Sasaki has requested that teams do not include their own players in any pitch meetings.

With Corbin Burnes off the market — and Max Fried and Blake Snell having signed earlier in the offseason — Roki Sasaki is the final ace remaining this offseason.

The prevailing theory in recent weeks is that Sasaki, who is meeting with upwards of 20 teams in the coming weeks as he looks to make a decision on where he’ll play when he comes stateside next year, will choose between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres.

On the surface, that makes a lot of sense, given that the Dodgers are the reigning World Series champions and employ two of the the biggest Japanese superstars in the game: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamto.

The Padres, meanwhile, are well-positioned to compete with the Dodgers for NL West supremacy after falling to them in Game 5 of the NLDS last season. They’re also the team that rosters Yu Darvish, one of Sasaki’s idols and mentors.

However, a new development in the Sasaki sweepstakes could hurt the Dodgers and Padres’ chances at landing the Japanese phenom.

While fellow countrymen weren’t going to be the only reason that Sasaki signed with one of the West Coast giants, he’s certainly leveled the playing field with this request.

Roki Sasaki appears determined to give every team a fair chance

Requesting that teams not include players in their recruiting pitches is a unique idea, since most teams like to flex and flaunt their star power to prospective additions, like a male peacock showing off his most colorful feathers. Effectively, they want to say: “Hey, look at what we’ve already got. You can be the piece that gets us over the hump,”.

It’s admirable, at least in the sense that it gives every team meeting with Sasaki a fair chance at putting together an enticing pitch. Speaking of, Sasaki’s agent, Joel Wolfe, confirmed that 20 teams reached out to him (and, presumably, are the 20 teams he’ll be taking meetings with).

It sort of boggles the mind that ten teams would pass on a free agent as talented and cheap as Sasaki, but perhaps some franchises accepted that the young pitcher would pass on them anyways and chose to redirect their offseason efforts elsewhere.

Besides the Dodgers and Padres, the Red Sox, Cubs, Mets, Yankees, Giants, and Mariners have been the teams most often linked to Sasaki in rumors and speculation. Like most Japanese players, it’s expected that Sasaki’s preference will be for the West Coast, though the Cubs especially have had a strong recent presence in the international free agent market (Seiya Suzuki, Shota Imanaga).

Only time will tell if the 23-year-old’s request will have any actual effect on this whole process. Perhaps he just didn’t want to meet the rosters of two-thirds of the league.