Just a couple of days ago, I wrote about star Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki and that the Cubs should absolutely, positively go after him if his NPB team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, posted him.

Today, the Marines made it official: They are posting Sasaki.

Ace Japanese right-hander Roki Sasaki appears headed to the Majors next season.

Sasaki, the consensus top young pitcher in Japan, will be posted by the Chiba Lotte Marines of Nippon Professional Baseball, the team announced.

“Since I joined [the Marines], I have continued to listen to my future MLB challenges, and I am grateful to the team for officially allowing me to post,” Sasaki said of his posting.

Since Sasaki is under 25 (he just turned 23 this week), he’s not eligible to get the huge payout that other Japanese players (for example, Yoshinobu Yamamoto) have received. Instead, he’ll have to be signed to a minor-league deal, which is limited by the amount of money teams have in their international signing pool. Here’s how it will work:

Once Sasaki is posted, all 30 MLB clubs will have 45 days to negotiate with him. Per the rules of the posting system, if no agreement is reached in that timeframe, Sasaki would return to his NPB club for the 2025 season and would not be eligible for posting again until next offseason.

The MLB club that signs Sasaki will have to pay a “release fee” to Chiba Lotte. For Major League contracts with a total guaranteed value of $25 million or less, the release fee is 20% of the total guaranteed value of the contract.

If this posting were made official today — and it might take a day or two — that 45-day window would expire on Christmas Eve, December 24. I would imagine most teams, including the Cubs, would try to woo Sasaki.

Granted that most think he’ll just head to the Dodgers, where Yamamoto and Japanese icon Shohei Ohtani play. The Cubs, though, also have two Japanese stars in Seiya Suzuki and Shōta Imanaga, and I’d like to think they have a fair chance. The Cubs were one of seven “finalists” when Ohtani originally signed out of Japan in 2018. One of the reasons the Cubs really had no chance at the time was that the NL did not have the DH in 2018, and so Ohtani could not really have been a fit with the Cubs at the time (nor with the Giants or Dodgers, the two other NL finalists back then).

That’s not an issue with Sasaki, who is strictly a pitcher.

Cubs President of Baseball Operations Jed Hoyer should make wooing Sasaki a priority over the next 45 days. Signing him would give the Cubs a top pitcher, under team control for six years, and still allow plenty of money for other signings.

Wouldn’t it be great to see Imanaga and Sasaki start the two games for the Cubs against the Dodgers next March in Tokyo?

Get it done, Jed.