In the latest signing in a busy international free-agent market, the Nationals agreed to a two-year deal with left-hander Shinnosuke Ogasawara on Friday. He will compete for a spot in the 2025 starting rotation.
Ogasawara is the first free agent signed directly from Asia by the Nationals and the first Nationals player born in Japan.
The 27-year-old was posted by the Chunichi Dragons in December. Friday was the last day of his posting window to sign with a Major League team for this season.
“We scouted Shino the last couple of seasons in Japan -- and we've liked players in the past,” general manager Mike Rizzo said on Saturday. “We just didn't have the relationship and the background to sell these players to come to D.C.
“With this particular player, we liked the skillset, we liked that the age fits our timeline and that type of thing. And in this particular case, we did have a relationship with the agency (WME), and that made us more attractive for him to choose us rather than some other team this time.”
Ogasawara has been pitching in Nippon Professional Baseball since 2016. Last season, he went 5-11 with a 3.12 ERA in 144 1/3 innings spread across 24 games. His walk rate improved from 2.3 to 1.4 walks per nine innings, but his strikeout rate also dropped from 7.5 to 5.1 from season to season.
“He doesn't walk many people,” Rizzo said. “He attacks the strike zone. He's the guy that looks for soft contact so he can go deeper into games … Some pitch sequencing and some pitch shapes I think is something that we're going to discuss with him. I think that he's going to want to pitch a little more four-seam fastball up in the zone. He was reluctant to do that in the Japanese League a little bit, and I think that'll be an asset for him.”
Ogasawara adds to a stacked group of starting pitchers who will vie for a role in the rotation during Spring Training. He joins right-handers Jake Irvin, Michael Soroka and Trevor Williams, and left-handers MacKenzie Gore, DJ Herz and Mitchell Parker in starter contention. (Righties Cade Cavalli and Josiah Gray are working back from Tommy John surgery.)
If he needs more time to develop, Ogasawara could be optioned to Triple-A Rochester to start the season, but Rizzo noted, “our plan is that he's big league ready.”
“This is the deepest starting pitching staff that we've had in a long time at the upper Minor Leagues and the Major Leagues,” said Rizzo. “We think that we go nine or 10 deep now, which is something that we've been trying to get to for years. You can never have enough starting pitching -- that is the driver of success in the big leagues.”
Ogasawara was a first-round pick out of Tokai University Sagami High School in the 2015 NPB Draft and debuted at age 18. Over his nine-year career with the Dragons, he went 54–72 with a 3.67 ERA in 190 games. Across 1,098 frames, he recorded 863 strikeouts to 361 walks.
“Part of the attractiveness to him is that he's not a finished product,” Rizzo said. “... [He has] nine years of pitching in the Japanese League, but he's at an age where we think that there's still some development that he could learn from and become a better pitcher than he even is now.”