When Sasaki held his initial round of in-person meetings with teams last month, the pitcher tasked each with a “homework assignment,” as his agent Joel Wolfe of Wasserman Media Group described it.
After his velocity slightly dipped in Japan last season, Sasaki wanted club officials to identify what they believed was off in his delivery. And, more important, he wanted to know how they planned to rectify it going into 2025.
“I thought it was a terrific idea,” Wolfe said of the assignment, one of several ways he said his client “drove the bus” of his own free-agency process. “I thought that the teams also loved the idea, because the specifics of the homework assignment gave the teams, number one, a very clear idea of what he wanted to hear … And he was asking, ‘What can you do to help me? And what do you think has gone wrong while I was in Japan? And how would you go about working with me and developing me?’ And that was a big part of his decision-making process.”
As for what Sasaki took away from the exercise?
“Because there was going to be limited time for me to be able to understand the differences between many teams,” he said through interpreter Will Ireton, “I just felt like this homework assignment was a really good opportunity for me to be able to find out how the teams think.”
When the Dodgers learned of the assignment, Friedman said, “we felt like it was right in our wheelhouse.”
“Our ability to showcase our performance science group, our training staff, our performance staff, our pitching coaches, how connected those groups are, we felt like really highlighted a strength of ours,” Friedman said. “It was more about how things would work going forward, if he were to be a Dodger, that we spent the most time with.”