The Yankees might not be long-shots in the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes after all

The dust has barely settled from the Cody Bellinger trade on Tuesday, but New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman is already plotting the team's next big move. And unlike the Bellinger deal, it's one that just about nobody saw coming.

From the moment Roki Sasaki announced that he'd be posted to the Majors, speculation has focused primarily on the West Coast — particularly the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, two teams that boast proximity to Japan and competitive rosters featuring friends and former teammates of the right-hander. And at the Winter Meetings, Sasaki's agent, Joel Wolfe, sure seemed to imply that his client might enjoy a smaller market, somewhere that he could develop and settle in without dealing with the media horde that follows, say, Shohei Ohtani.

All of which still could well be true. But as a 23-year-old who's never pitched in the States, there's still a ton we don't know about Sasaki and what he values. And as reports of his free-agent process begin to trickle out, it seems like we could be in for a surprise — one that might benefit the Yankees, if Cashman can play his cards right.

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Yankees have scored in-person meeting with Roki Sasaki

In a media appearance after Max Fried's introductory press conference on Wednesday, Cashman was asked a variety of questions about the team's next steps. One of the questions was about Sasaki, to which Cashman let slip that New York had an in-person meeting scheduled with the Japanese ace in the coming days.

The fact that the Yankees have reached this stage of the Sasaki sweepstakes is at least potentially significant. While every team had the opportunity to send a digital presentation to Sasaki and Wolfe, it's up to the player and his support system to evaluate those presentations and then decide which teams they'd like to meet with in person.

Clearly, something in the Yankees' initial pitch caught his eye. This isn't merely an instance of an agent keeping a big-market team on the hook for the purposes of stoking a bidding war; because Sasaki is an international amateur free agent, he can only be signed with bonus pool money, meaning there'll be very little bidding involved. There's no reason for the righty to go out of his way to meet with New York unless he's potentially interested, and if he's potentially interested, it means that being on the East Coast or in a bigger market isn't an automatic dealbreaker.

None of which means the Yankees should be considered the favorite. Presumably the Dodgers, Padres and several other teams (maybe the New York Mets, whom Sasaki has publicly admired in the past?) will get the same chance, and it could well be that Sasaki will wind up staying on the West Coast after all. This does at the very least throw a wrench into the works, though, and now it's up to Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner to bring it home.