Trying to just be good enough has consequences

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The next big thing out of Japan (no, not the special anniversary edition PS5), Roki Sasaki is going to be an incredible bargain for some lucky team. Because he convinced his Nippon Baseball League team, the Chiba Lotte Marines to post him before his 25th birthday, he’s considered an international free agent and is limited in what he can make by the international free agency pools of each big league team.

The most any team will be able to offer him is a $7 million signing bonus. He’ll be like every other young international free agent. He won’t be eligible for arbitration until after his third season and not eligible for free agency until after his sixth. Compare that to Yoshinobu Yamamoto who waited until he was 25 to make the jump to the big leagues who signed for a paltry 12 years, and $375 million.

We won’t be having a bake sale for Roki. He wanted to get started on his big league dream as soon as possible.

When Shohei Ohtani came over in similar circumstances before the 2018 season he got a $2.5 million signing bonus. And at the time the Cubs were one of the teams he was interested in signing with.

And why wouldn’t he have been? They were just a year away from winning the World Series, they had a talented young core, a supposedly still prosperous farm system, they were paying actual money to their players, Wrigley Field is a great place to play. They may have never been a more attractive free agent destination. In the end, the lack of a designated hitter in the National League doomed their pursuit, and he narrowed it down to the two teams in LA and chose the Angels because he could pitch and hit. Now he plays for the Dodgers because they’re a better franchise and the no-DH hurdle has been gone full time since 2022.

Now, just seven offseasons since Shohei had to make his decision, the Cubs find themselves in a much less attractive place. They haven’t made the playoffs in four years. Haven’t scored more than one run in a postseason game in seven.

One of the things that intrigued Shohei was the Cubs’ ambition. They had done what it took to win and appeared to be willing to keep doing that.

But do we think Roki Sasaki thinks that, now? Not after all of these years of “intelligent spending” and “biblical losses” have rendered the Cubs a team content to maybe be just good enough to make the playoffs.

Sasaki represents everything the Cubs crave. He’s young, destined to be a star, a top of the rotation ace and he’d come with the two words that warm the cockles of Tom Ricketts’ heart, “cost control.”