{"id":756055,"date":"2026-07-19T17:15:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T17:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/756055\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T17:15:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T17:15:22","slug":"japanese-slugger-rintaro-sasaki-to-sign-with-marlins-forgo-professional-career-in-home-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/756055\/","title":{"rendered":"Japanese slugger Rintaro Sasaki to sign with Marlins, forgo professional career in home country"},"content":{"rendered":"

HANAMAKI \u2013 Japanese slugger Rintaro Sasaki<\/a> will sign with the Miami Marlins and forgo a professional career in his home country.<\/p>\n

The Marlins selected Sasaki out of Stanford in the eighth round of Major League Baseball’s amateur draft<\/a> last week, but the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks also selected him in the first round of the Nippon Professional Baseball draft.<\/p>\n

The difficult decision had Sasaki fighting back tears during a news conference in his hometown on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore than anyone else, I believe I understand my own limitations and how much I still need to improve,\u201d Sasaki said. \u201cEven if this path ultimately turns out to be the wrong choice, I do not want to live with regret. Rather than defining my life by whether I succeed or fail, I want to define it by whether I had the courage to take on a challenge. With that belief in mind, I ultimately decided to pursue this path.”<\/p>\n

Sasaki played under Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani\u2019s father, Toru, and is Japan’s all-time high school home run leader with 140. He made waves out of high school, opting out of the Nippon league’s draft to play at Stanford<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 21-year-old first baseman played two seasons at Stanford, hitting .262 with 16 homers and 47 RBIs as a sophomore last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went back and forth on this decision until the very end,” Sasaki said. “Ever since I chose to attend Stanford, I have always had a strong desire to challenge myself in the United States. In the end, that desire won out. I felt that I wanted to see how far I could go by challenging myself in America, and that feeling became stronger than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP MLB: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/mlb<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HANAMAKI \u2013 Japanese slugger Rintaro Sasaki will sign with the Miami Marlins and forgo a professional career in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2276],"tags":[5,2291,4,1586,468,185],"class_list":["post-756055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb-draft","tag-baseball","tag-major-league-baseball-draft","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-draft","tag-shohei-ohtani","tag-sports"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116947774575314362","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}