Sasaki announced his marriage on Instagram on Friday. For the second winter in a row, a Japanese superstar announced a marriage to an anonymous woman on Instagram right after joining the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Last year, it was Shohei Ohtani. This year, it’s Roki Sasaki.
Amid his first spring training with the Dodgers, the pitching phenom published an Instagram post on Friday announcing he had recently married a woman:
The very rough automated translation from the Instagram post:
Thank you for your continued support.
The other day, I registered my marriage with an ordinary woman.
This is a new start both in our personal and professional lives and we are full of both excitement and anxiety, but we will work hard together as a couple, so we hope you will continue to support us kindly.
It’s worth nothing that in the context of the second sentence, “ordinary” means Sasaki is saying he did not marry a celebrity or anyone fans should know.
Of course, Ohtani said basically the same thing last year, and it turned out that the “ordinary” woman was former professional basketball player Mamiko Tanaka. Ohtani declined to reveal her identity or provide any other details during spring training, but he didn’t bother hiding her when they flew to South Korea together for the Dodgers’ season opener.
Sasaki’s wife could be revealed in a similar fashion at the Tokyo Series next month.
Marriage aside, Sasaki is in Arizona preparing for his highly anticipated MLB debut. The right-hander is one of the most hyped pitching prospects in recent baseball history, with prospect experts comparing him to Stephen Strasburg and Paul Skenes. He is nowhere close to a sure thing, mostly thanks to his health, but his ceiling is as high as that of any arm in baseball.
The Dodgers landed Sasaki on a $6.5 million signing bonus, an outrageous discount made possible by the fact that the 23-year-old came over two years before he would have been able to sign a nine-figure deal.
Just like Ohtani, Sasaki announced his decision via Instagram before any stateside reporters broke the news.
In the NPB, Sasaki mostly got by with a fastball that sat in the upper 90s and often topped 100 mph and a demonic splitter considered one of the best pitches in the world. He has also been working on a slider for the past year or so, but the bigger question is if he will be able to stay on the mound through an entire MLB season, despite never throwing more than 130 innings in Japan.
