⚾️ Roki Sasaki's MLB upside is uncertain — but he's worth the risk for the Dodgers
My Week in Sport(s) ⚾️ 🏉 ⚽️ 🏀 🎾
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: ⚾️ Roki Sasaki, 🏉 France, ⚽️ Naomi Girma, 🏀 Cooper Flagg and 🎾 Jannik Sinner.
⚾️ Roki Sasaki's MLB upside is uncertain — but he's worth the risk for the Dodgers
For the second straight offseason, the Los Angeles Dodgers have signed the most coveted Japanese pitcher on baseball’s free-agent market. Last year, it was Yoshinobu Yamamoto for $325m; last week, it was the hard-throwing Roki Sasaki.
Sasaki will receive much less money from his first MLB contract than Yamamoto will — a financial gap that reflects each pitcher’s age and contractual status at the time they left their homeland behind. Like Shohei Ohtani before him, Sasaki decided to jump from NPB at age 23 — meaning he was only able to sign as an international ‘amateur’, and wasn’t eligible for a megadeal like Yamamoto’s. That status, in turn, is an indicator of the limited experience the pitcher has of professional baseball so far in his career.
After Yamamoto signed, I wrote about the many factors that would impact how his skills would translate from NPB. In his case, we were fairly certain of just how good a pitcher he was on home soil — but, with Sasaki, there’s considerably more uncertainty before you even get to the question of how his pitching will project in a new context. Not one of the seven Japanese starting pitchers who were active in MLB last year pitched fewer NPB innings than Sasaki before taking the leap to North America.
And there’s another reason for uncertainty: in 2024, Sasaki was a much less impressive pitcher than he had been earlier in his NPB career. He missed some time during the season due to injury, and lost both velocity and movement on his fastball when he was able to pitch. To be clear, MLB clubs would still have been queuing up to sign last year’s version of Sasaki — but he didn’t look quite as generational a prospect as the pitcher who nearly threw two consecutive perfect games at 20 years old.
The Dodgers were more than happy to take the risk, though — not least because there’s also uncertainty on the upside. Rather than wait another two years and cash in on “a Yamamoto-sized deal”, Sasaki was motivated to put himself in the best possible learning environment as early as he could. Choosing the Dodgers — a franchise lauded for their player development — likely raises his potential ceiling, and keeps alive the tantalising possibility that he will one day be the best pitcher on the planet.
🏉 France are the best attacking team in the men’s Six Nations — and it’s not close
A couple of weeks ago, I referenced the difficulty of assigning value to individual rugby players in this newsletter. Imbalanced schedules in men’s international rugby make assessing relative team strength hard, too — but it’s not an impossible task.
The table below — prepared in time for the start of the Six Nations — is an initial step towards doing a better job of this assessment. For each of the 10 ‘Tier 1’ international sides, I have taken the number of points they’ve scored in their four latest games against each of the other nine, applied basic adjustments for home advantage and recency and used the output to calculate an ‘attack rating’: the number of points more or less than average that you might expect them to score against ‘Tier 1’ opponents.
According to this simple model, France — led by scrum-half Antoine Dupont — are comfortably the best attacking team in Europe: they’ve scored around five more points per game than a typical ‘Tier 1’ team in their most recent set of fixtures. As the year in test rugby unfolds, I’ll return to this analysis — and expand on it, by adding a ‘defence’ component and estimating overall team strength. For now, though, just make sure you keep an eye on Les Bleus later today at the Stade de France.
What else I learned last week
⚽️ Before signing Naomi Girma, Chelsea’s defence had quietly declined
In the long term, Chelsea’s recent signing of USWNT centre-back Naomi Girma for a world-record fee may have significant implications for the reputation of the domestic competition she’s joining — as well as that of the one she’s leaving behind.
In the short term, the question is what it means for the WSL’s top team. Defenders are difficult players to value, but Girma’s play gets widespread acclaim — and it’s in the Champions League that Chelsea will hope that she can be a true difference-maker. However, their defence in league play has quietly slipped in recent years, too. Since 2022-23, they’ve conceded chances worth 0.8 non-penalty xG per WSL game; over the three seasons prior, they conceded just under 0.5 xG in each match on average.
🏀 Cooper Flagg would be the youngest top NBA draft pick since LeBron
Alongside JuJu Watkins, one of the college basketball players I’m paying close attention to this year is Cooper Flagg. He might even outstrip the on-court impact of Zion Williamson as a freshman at Duke, according to
’s player ratings.Unlike Watkins, Flagg won’t have to wait several years before turning pro — and, when he does, he will be incredibly young even by the standards of NBA rookies. He chose to leave high school to attend college a year early, and would be the first top selection to begin his rookie season at 18 since the league changed its draft eligibility rules in 2006. Flagg’s age can’t be emphasised enough when considering his development trajectory — and the hype he’s already garnering as a possible future star of the NBA.
🎾 Jannik Sinner is hitting the start of his peak and leaving Alcaraz behind
Age is an important factor to consider when thinking about the biggest names in men’s tennis, too. At one end of the scale, you have 37-year-old Novak Djokovic — but the gap between the sport’s two newest heavyweights is also a significant one.
They’re often grouped together in the same generation, but Jannik Sinner is almost two years older than Carlos Alcaraz — and he’s accelerating away from his rival, even as the Spaniard still holds the Grand Slam advantage. After a second Australian Open title, Sinner hit his highest-ever Elo rating at Tennis Abstract — and one of the highest marks ever by that metric — this week. According to site operator Jeff Sackmann, “only eight players in the Open era have ever been better than the Italian is right now”.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday February 7th.
