way out of here this is baseball tonight the podcast welcome to the baseball tonight

podcast for tuesday december 31st the final podcast of the year busters on vacation i'm j'm Jesse Rogers sitting in. We'll talk to Arizona

Diamondbacks manager, Tori Lavello, in just a bit. But first, let's dive into the Roki Sasaki

sweepstakes with my colleague, Jeff Pass. And Jeff, happy New Year. How you doing, pal?

Doing great, Jesse. Happy New Year to you, too. Thank you very much. Good to see you.

Our final sort of topic of the year involves Sasaki and his free agent process. I guess you

could call it a free agent process. It's a little different than Yamamoto's last year or many of

the Japanese players that come over.

He is restricted to the international rules.

He has to sign a minor league contract because of his age and service time over in Japan for those that don't know.

So that's why it's a little different than most of the Japanese players that come over here. And also different is the process with his agent, Joe Wolf, who has several

Japanese players playing in the major leagues. Joel has done several media availability,

including just on Monday, Jeff, as you and I know as reporters, that is a little bit unusual.

So without, you know, going down the the rabbit all too much, other than doing this out of the goodness

of his heart, do you think there's some ulterior motives with Joel doing these media

availability?

Is he kind of sending a message to people, maybe teams themselves, about this process?

I think there's such a fervor over Roki Sasaki right now that anybody who's willing to wet the

appetite of the various media members involved is much appreciated because we have to understand who Roki Sasaki is first

before understanding why they're going about doing things the way they are.

This is somebody who, as a teenager, was extraordinarily famous in Japan already.

Like, you want pop idols in Japan?

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