Roki Sasaki, the 23-year-old who is set to come stateside this winter and is among the highest-touted pitchers Japan has ever produced, would be additive to any rotation in baseball. Let’s establish that as the baseline for this conversation.

Every team should want to sign him. I know there are a lot of factors that go into such a decision — geography, money, culture and opportunity among them. I think it just needs to be said, if baseball were the only criteria, he should want to sign with the Orioles.

Even as we celebrate an offseason in which it seems like money will be no obstacle to the Orioles in their pursuit of winning talent around their homegrown core, it’s important to note that this won’t be about money for Sasaki, who starred at the World Baseball Classic last year and has dominated in Japan over the last four seasons.

All players under 25 without at least six years of professional experience are treated as international amateur free agents by MLB, and teams can spend only what is allotted to them each year on international players. The Orioles are behind only the Dodgers with $2.147 million in their 2024 bonus pool remaining, according to MLB.com, so they could make an attractive offer for a signing bonus, then Sasaki would be paid like a rookie at the league minimum for the first three seasons of his career before he enters salary arbitration.

So the Orioles can be as competitive as anyone when it comes to money, and they have the need atop their rotation in a world where Corbin Burnes and John Means are free agents and Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez are injury-related question marks.

But I bet there are only a handful of teams who can be at or near the Orioles’ level as they sit down with Sasaki and pitch him on how he can improve, how his development and workload in the major leagues will be handled, and how he can benefit from pitching in Baltimore.

That might be the view that only a person extremely bullish on the Orioles’ pitching program can have, but it feels warranted to me. As I’ve been making my offseason calls and talking to people inside and outside the organization about Orioles prospects for rankings season, it seems as though everyone outside the organization has a favorite pitcher different from anyone else’s.

And everyone has marveled at how quickly the level of pitching talent in their farm system has grown. When they wonder how a certain pitcher with multiple major league-quality pitches can spend most of the year at Low-A, the answer that there’s too many similarly good pitchers who need innings above him is believable enough to be satisfactory.

They’re creating this bubble of talent that’s rising to Baltimore a few ways, notably through pitch design and workload management. They don’t need to give Sasaki a splitter, as they have so many of their other young pitchers, but I bet before long he’d be experimenting with a second slider-like shape and maybe even a two-seamer.

Given he hasn’t been the most durable pitcher, the way the Orioles would maximize his time on the mound while managing his workload would be helpful as well. (It also would be a reason for the Orioles to maybe steer clear if we were talking a larger outlay, and whether their emphasis on durability for pitchers they acquire carries over in this new era of additional financial resources remains to be seen.)

The Orioles aren’t alone in their success developing pitchers and having a program that can almost ensure Sasaki will be the best version of himself. It’s just that the one started by Chris Holt and now headed by major league pitching coach Drew French, assistant pitching coach Mitch Plassmeyer and new Director of Pitching Forrest Herrmann is relatively nascent.

That the Dodgers and Mariners are much closer to Japan and have similar success in developing arms tilts that playing field away from the Orioles. Same goes for the Yankees, though they’re obviously located on this coast.

Sasaki could sign anywhere, and there’s not a lot of buzz about him signing with the Orioles outside Baltimore, where there’s obviously a vested interest. It would be an absolute boon to the Orioles to add a pitcher of that caliber to their roster at a low and fixed cost, and yet taking general manager Mike Elias at his word, there’s going to be a starting rotation addition this winter if all goes as planned.

They can just move on to their next target and likely not miss out on much — and perhaps even benefit by not adding someone who needs to adapt to a new life and league.

If you’ve read this far, you might be among the small subset of Orioles fans who will cringe or roll their eyes at the names Victor Victor Mesa and Victor Mesa Jr. Back as the Orioles’ front office was in transition in 2018, these two young Cuban outfielders defected and came available to sign in the fall, when many teams had spent their bonus allotments. It made sense for a team that was going all in on a rebuild to add a couple more prospects to the mix.

Given how badly that season went and all the uncertainty around whether the Orioles could fix what was a full-blown catastrophe of a baseball team, the Mesa pursuits were an early opportunity for proof of concept, even as Elias hadn’t been hired yet and there was a culling of personnel occurring in the front office.

Ultimately, they signed elsewhere, and it’s not like the Orioles missed out. Both are in the Marlins’ organization in Triple-A right now. But that felt like a circumstance that was forced. Sure, the Orioles had the bonus pool available to sign them, but why would anyone with their pick of the league have chosen the Orioles’ player development system as the one for them?

Now, the opposite is true. There are all kinds of reasons a pitcher would choose to join this organization. The Orioles can’t control a lot of a process like this. But that’s an inarguable truth, to me, and it wasn’t too long ago that such a thought would have felt ridiculous. For that reason, I’m allowing myself to entertain a signing that would be equally fanciful.