Left-hander Shinnosuke Ogasawara has been officially posted by the Chunichi Dragons of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball, per reporter Francys Romero. That opens up a 45-day window for his representatives at William Morris Endeavor to negotiate with major league clubs. If no deal is reached in that time, the southpaw will return to the Dragons for 2025.
While Ogasawara should generate interest, he’s clearly not exciting as Roki Sasaki, who has also been posted for clubs this offseason. However, Ogasawara likely has more earning power than Sasaki due to the binary nature of MLB international signing rules.
Players need to be 25 years old and have six seasons of experience in a foreign professional league in order to be considered “professionals” and have the right to freely negotiate a contract of any size and length. Players who don’t meet those criteria are considered “amateurs” and are therefore subject to the international bonus pool system, where each club gets $5M-8M annually to spend on such players. Sasaki is only 23 years old and will therefore be limited to a minor league deal with a signing bonus of a few million bucks. Ogasawara, on the other hand, is 27 years old and has appeared in parts of nine NPB seasons. That means he has the freedom to fully assess his earning power and market himself to the highest bidder.
How much interest North American clubs will have in him is unknown. Ogasawara has had some success, but not as much as some other pitchers that have recently come over like Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Shota Imanaga. He has thrown 951 1/3 innings over his NPB career, striking out just 18.9% of batters faced. For context, MLB average is usually in the 22-23% range. He did get his strikeout rate up to 24% in 2022 but it dropped to 20.1% last year and then all the way to 13.6% in 2024.
The lack of punchouts hasn’t stopped him from succeeding in Japan, as he has a 3.62 earned run average over his career and had a 3.12 ERA in the season that just finished, though MLB clubs might wonder if the same pitch-to-contact approach could carry over to North American ball.
Ogasawara is also on the smaller side for a starting pitcher, listed at 5’11” and 183 pounds. That’s actually slightly larger than the 5’10” and 175 pounds listed for Imanaga, so it’s not a total disqualification, but Imanaga managed to strike out 25% of batters faced in his NPB career.
Even if Ogasawara is a notch below Imanaga, he could still generate interest. Youth is clearly an attractive quality, which is why guys like Yamamoto, Jung Hoo Lee and Juan Soto have been paid so well, so the fact that Ogasawara just turned 27 in October will work in his favor. The recent downturn in strikeouts is a bit concerning, but he also lowered his walk rate to a tiny 3.7% rate in 2024 and the ERA was still good.
It’s difficult to forecast a contract for a player coming from another league like Ogasawara but MLBTR predicted after the start of the offseason that he could land a two-year, $12M deal. Perhaps he could benefit from the fact that the market for mid-rotation starters has been quite strong so far this winter. Each of Luis Severino, Yusei Kikuchi, Frankie Montas, Matthew Boyd and Clay Holmes have earned larger guarantees than projected in recent weeks, which could perhaps trickle down to Ogasawara.
The lefty will have more than a month to feel out the market and gauge interest. For clubs still looking to add in the rotation but who don’t want to pay for top names like Corbin Burnes, Max Fried or Jack Flaherty, Ogasawara will be part of a mid-rotation or back-end group that still includes Sean Manaea, Nathan Eovaldi, Jeff Hoffman, Nick Pivetta, Andrew Heaney, Jose Quintana, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and others.
