The 25-year-old right hander has already traveled the baseball world
There isn’t much easily searchable info on Yuhi Sako, the 25-year-old pitcher the Mets signed out of the Frontier League.
Part of that is his journeyman status: In his brief career, Sako has already pitched at a semi-professional level in Japan, Australia, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Sonora, Mexico before signing a Minor League deal with the Mets in December. That’s not a particularly odd career path for most aspiring pitchers—but it is one for a Japanese pitcher.
That’s because Japan has a comprehensive and massively successful player development system that very few domestic players stray away from. Without getting too in the weeds, here are the typical pathways for a Japanese amateur to become a professional ballplayer:
- A really good high school player gets drafted by an NPB team.
- A really good college player gets drafted or signed by an NPB team.
- A really good independent league player gets drafted or signed by an NPB team.
There have been recent exceptions, of course. Former high school standout Rintaro Sasaki is currently playing at Stanford, likely taking advantage of more lucrative and potentially rewarding development opportunities stateside. Current White Sox prospect Rikuu Nishida chose to play college ball at Oregon after playing high school ball in Japan. Even Shohei Ohtani considered cutting his teeth in the minors instead of joining NPB out of high school before being convinced to play his first few years in his home country.
The key difference here—with a mountain of speculation considering the lack of info on Sako—is that players like Sasaki and Ohtani all had much more hype coming out of high school and considered alternative options despite essentially having a guaranteed path to pro ball in Japan. That doesn’t seem to be the case with Sako.
According to Anthony DiComo, Sako played ball in the Japanese Industrial League, a competitive semi-pro league most easily compared to independent ball in the U.S. That probably means he wasn’t ready for pro ball either out of high school or college (if he played college ball).
He then joined the Canberra Calvary of the Australian Baseball League in 2022 while declaring his intention to enter the 2023 NPB draft (where he went undrafted). After two seasons in Australia, two in indy ball, and two innings over the winter for Yaquis de Obregon in the Mexican Pacific League, Sako finds himself in the Mets organization.
So…what does Sako offer? Based on grainy video from the ABL, potentially good velo on his fastball without much movement (although it’s incredibly hard to tell in a limited sample) and some movement on a handful of slower offerings. It’s possible it isn’t enough to have gotten Japanese teams intrigued, or else he would have been toiling away in the minors over there by now. Then again, it could just be that he wanted to pitch elsewhere. We just don’t know!
The overall point is that Sako is a pretty big mystery. Perhaps Mets scouts saw something and are taking a low-risk flyer, but considering his path to this point, it’s likely going to take a huge progression for us to see Sako in a Mets uniform anytime soon.