MLB: .com makes a point to let everyone know that next big Japanese shit, pitcher Roki Sasaki will not be signing with the Yankees
Back in like 1998, there was an episode of WCW Monday Nitro where Bret Hart was cutting a promo in the ring with Mean Gene Okerlund, going on about whatever Bret Hart martyr speak he was gushing about at the time, most likely his beef with the nWo. And then without any notice, Brian Adams, formerly Crush of WWE just meanders into the ring to confront Bret.
At the time, the nWo was wildly more popular than anything WCW-branded, and the nWo was seemingly adding new members left and right, whether they were WCW guys turning coat, or guys just coming into the company just being introduced as new nWo members.
Brian Adams was pretty much a guy that had been primarily a bad guy heel character throughout his whole career to this point, so he seemed like a natural fit for the nWo. Furthermore, he came into the ring wearing all black and a black trench coat, and the most cliched trope in history at the time was opening a coat and revealing a nWo shirt underneath, oh what a dastardly bad guy.
Basically, Adams got on the mic and told Bret Hart that he would have his back in his plight against the nWo, but absolutely anyone with even just a quarter of a brain knew what was going to happen. Neither Bret or Mean Gene were remotely convinced, and even the crowd, and WCW crowds were a very different breed of dumb wrestling fans, could smell the most obvious of rats in the history of attempted trickery.
Sure enough, they didn’t even bother to save it for a later segment much less a future show, and Adams opened his coat to reveal the nWo shirt that even Ray Charles could see was there, and Bret got a beatdown when the rest of the gang showed up.
Roki Sasaki is basically Brian Adams, and pretty much every baseball fan on the planet knows he’s going to end up on the Dodgers. No matter what he says, no matter what bullshit media reporting is done that he’s “giving everyone a chance,” and trying to convince people that there’s a possibility he ends up anywhere other than the Dodgers.
A guy who probably speaks no English isn’t going to want to go to any place not a small market with absolutely no Japanese presence much less Asians in general. He’s not going to Milwaukee, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and I highly doubt Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Oakland Las Vegas Sacramento, or Baltimore were any of the 20 teams that were reportedly interested because Japanese hot shits require this thing called money to even be invited into the conversation.
Japanese hot shits want money, and want comfort. So they require a big market, preferably one with Japanese and other Asian people, to have some remote chance that they can get a taste of home when they’re playing abroad. This is why New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles are always in the conversation whenever Japanese hot shits are on the market, but when it comes down to it, Los Angeles always covers multiple bases because they offer money, comfort of demographic, and the shortest flight distance to Japan, which is why they typically have the highest success rate at landing them.
Geography is undefeated.
Nobody’s buying it, and nobody really even cares. At this point, it’s more exasperating that they’re wasting people’s time at even bothering to exert time and energy into this sad ruse, and baseball fans just want him to go ahead and declare the Dodgers his choice of destination, have his shitty little press conference, put on his jersey and shut the fuck up so we can move onto the next storyline, or even the arrival of Spring Training.
Furthermore, the Dodgers have been low-key tampering with the whole thing, with golden boy Shohei Ohtani probably having all sorts of conversations and being in his ear trying to recruit him, since they were national team teammates.
Money isn’t going to be an issue, because the Dodgers would probably defer 60%+ of the contract until like 2040. The only real issue is that the Dodgers frankly don’t need Roki, because they already have a full pitching rotation with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Balakey Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May, and eventually Ohtani himself, but there’s always the possibility that Ohtani just goes another season as just a DH while he recovers, and the Dodgers aren’t the type of team to not pick up a hot shit free agent because they have no need, so much as they can deny others from getting them.
The only question mark and viable alternative to the Dodgers are the San Diego Padres, who also fulfills a lot of the Japanese hot shit checkboxes, but they also play in paradise. Plus, the fact that Yu Darvish is already there is the safety net that holds some legitimate weight for Japanese guys.
But if I’m a betting man, when Roki does peel off his black trench coat, I still got the Dodgers shirt on underneath. In the cyclical ecosystem of baseball, the rich tend to get richer, before they eventually age out, crash out and bail out before they actually deal with any sort of adversity, many years down the line.
