There's now a 50 percent chance Roki Sasaki becomes baseball's new biggest villain

With just days remaining in his posting window, Roki Sasaki has reached the final stage of his blockbuster free agency. Two-thirds of the league made an initial overture to the Japanese ace, whose combination of wipeout stuff and an extremely team-friendly contract make him arguably the biggest non-Juan Soto free agent of the winter. But now, after weeks of meetings and visits, the righty has started to make some difficult decisions.

Monday marked the beginning of the end game for Sasaki, as the 23-year-old began informing finalists that he was no longer interested in signing with. And if the first few teams that didn't make the cut are any indication, Sasaki has his sights set on a destination that might spell doom for the rest of the league — and turn him into a heel before he even sets foot on a Major League mound.

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Dodgers look more and more like a lock to land Roki Sasaki

Sasaki took in-person meetings with a host of teams, from the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres to the New York Mets and Yankees as well as the Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants and Texas Rangers. He even added the Toronto Blue Jays to that list recently. But one by one, that list has begun to shorten.

The Giants were the first on the chopping block, as word broke on Monday afternoon that Sasaki had ruled out San Francisco. Then the Yankees and Mets soon followed, giving creedence to the notion that the righty is mostly considering teams on the West Coast. At this point, the options are dwindling, and the destination that seemed inevitable at the start of this whole saga is closer than ever: It sure seems like Sasaki is destined to become a Dodger.

Maybe that's jumping the gun a bit; Sasaki just visited San Diego last weekend, and the Padres have been neck and neck with L.A. throughout. But the Padres are also actively trying to shed payroll amid an ugly ownership dispute, which hardly seems like the competitive environment Sasaki would sign up for to start his MLB career. The Jays are an even bigger mess right now, while other potential contenders like the Cubs, Rangers and Seattle Mariners were mired in mediocrity in 2024.

Unless Sasaki throws everyone a curveball, the Dodgers are the obvious choice, a West Coast power in a major city with the largest Japanese population in the continental U.S. and with a rotation already featuring two other Japanese stars. And if that is in fact the case, Sasaki would immediately become the biggest villain in baseball, the man who could've gone anywhere but opted to make the loaded World Series champions even more of a superteam for 2025 and beyond.

Granted, anything can happen over the course of a long season (and amid the chaos of October), and Sasaki himself is far from a perfect prospect. There are workload concerns, and his stuff regressed a bit in 2024. But still ... man, it's hard to imagine how any team would hang with the Dodgers this season. L.A. could form nearly two full MLB-caliber rotations from Sasaki, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani (when he eventually returns to the mound), Tyler Glasnow, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May, plus youngsters Landon Knack and Emmet Sheehan. Oh, the lineup still has the best top of the order in baseball with Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, plus the returning Teoscar Hernandez.

The bullpen still needs some work, but there just so happen to be a ton still available on the free agent market, and it's not like Sasaki will come at a prohibitive cost. The Dodgers will be a team more or less without holes, and with more star power than most of the rest of the league combined. It's likely that Sasaki couldn't really care less about how he's greeted by opposing fans in the States. But anti-Dodgers sentiment has been building for a while now, a team that can already develop homegrown stars and sign everyone else's developing an easy pipeline to all the best players in Japan, and signing Sasaki will be the thing that causes it to boil over.