Japan has produced some of the premier baseball players in the history of the sport. Just to name a few, Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro Suzuki, Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka, Yu Darvish, Koji Uehara, Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Hideki Matsui, among many others.
Rintaro Sasaki, the top high school prospect in Japan, could be the next great Japanese-born player in the MLB. At 6’0’’, 250 lbs., Sasaki is reportedly considering playing college baseball in the United States after his final season at Hanamaki-Higashi High School.
According to Yakyu Cosmopolitan, a reliable source for Japanese baseball, there is growing speculation that “Sasaki will skip the NPB draft to attend college in the United States.”
The magazine also states that “It’s only natural for a generational talent to keep his options open. If he dreams of becoming a top MLB slugger, he might think it makes more sense from a development standpoint to go stateside now. That said, he’s probably just doing this to gain leverage & will settle on NPB.”
Reading that, it may be a long shot for Sasaki, a generational talent, to actually move to the United States, especially since there are rules that condone such a decision.
“There are already restrictions and rules in place that greatly discourage it, but they can’t stop him from doing it. They can just make it difficult for him to return to NPB if he fails in the US, adding risk to the decision.”
For Tim Corbin and Vanderbilt, why not try to snag Sasaki?
The Yakyu Cosmopolitan confirmed that Sasaki is indeed “Eyeing Vanderbilt.”
Remarkably, during his high school career, he hit 138 home runs, which easily broke Kotaro Kiyomiya’s high school home run record of 111. He’s been coined by some as the “Japanese Prince Fielder.”
In official games, he’s slashing a ridiculous .413 / .514 / .808 / 1.322 OPS. According to a Yakyu Cosmopolitan YouTube video, Sasaki is “built like a tank and might have as much raw power as any 17-year old in the planet.”
Hiroshi Sasaki, Rintaroi’s father is also his coach at Hanamaki-Higashi High School. That's the same team that Shohei Ohtani played for when he was in high school.
In an ever-changing landscape of college sports, which now seems to revolve around the transfer portal and NIL possibilities, this would be an outside-the-box move from Tim Corbin. If the Commodores could land Sasaki, it would also prove the global reach of this program in a remarkable way.
With rumors and speculation gaining traction in terms of Vanderbilt's inability to attract the top transfer portal players, similar to other SEC programs, signing Sasaki would silence many of those critics. Now, of course, this is far from a done deal, but the fact that Vanderbilt is even being considered by Sasaki is a strong endorsement of one of the premier college baseball programs in the country.
The marketing appeal would be something college baseball has never seen and the VandyBoys would be right in the middle of it.
In a sense, this move could potentially act as the college version of a Shohei Ohtani-type phenomenon. Although Sasaki does not pitch, the name recognition in and of itself would create media attention even stronger than the duo of Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter.
