Roki Sasaki's LeBron James meet-up shows he was never signing anywhere but L.A.

Throughout his free agency sweepstakes, Roki Sasaki and his agent, Joel Wolfe, insisted to anyone who would listen that every team in every market would be seriously considered. In fact, Wolfe argued, a smaller market might actually be in Sasaki's best interests, given his rough treatment at the hands of the Japanese media at times over the last few years. The San Diego Padres, for instance, offered a convenient West Coast location without quite as harsh a spotlight.

And yet, despite giving the entire league the runaround for weeks, Sasaki just wound up choosing the Los Angeles Dodgers in the end. You know, the team that plays in the second-largest market in the country, that just won the 2024 World Series, that already features some of the most famous names in the sport — including Sasaki's countrymen, Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who commanded a Japanese press contingent in the dozens last season. So much easing his way into life in the States.

And as if that weren't evidence enough, the righty is going out of his way to make clear that, really, he wanted to be a Dodger all along.

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Roki Sasaki already making the most of newfound Dodgers celebrity

Just a few days after announcing that he'd be signing with L.A., Sasaki flew across the Pacific to spend some time in his new home city. And really, what good is living as a sports star in Los Angeles if you're not going to parlay it into courtside seats to take in LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers?

Sasaki was front and center at Crypto.com Arena for the Lakers' win over the Washington Wizards on Tuesday night. And he didn't just take in the game: He also got to meet LeBron himself, who came over and dapped him up before tip-off.

All of which is understandable; if you were 23 years old with every Major League team banging down your door, wouldn't you have a hard time saying no to the Dodgers? They're the Dodgers, after all, and being famous in L.A. is unlike being famous anywhere else in the country. You can hardly blame Sasaki for making the choice he did, or for wanting to live it up amid LeBron and all the many other stars who call SoCal home.

We probably could've done without the month-long song and dance, though. Wolfe successfully portrayed Sasaki as something other than a young athlete looking to enjoy being a young athlete, snookering several fan bases in the process. In reality, the righty always wanted to be a Dodger, for all the reasons seemingly everyone else in baseball wants to be a Dodger right now. It's just that most of them don't spend time trying to convince us otherwise.