into a wide smile.

“We’ve added a lot of impact talent.”

Sasaki might very well be the most talented of the group with the potential to be an annual Cy Young contender. Sasaki’s 100 mph fastball and devastating splitter have prompted comparisons to another two-time Cy Young Award winner, Jacob deGrom, as well as the National League’s reigning Rookie of the Year, Paul Skenes.

“To have done what he was able to do in Japan at this age and there’s room to get better — it’s really exciting and impressive,” Gomes said.

Sasaki didn’t seem very impressed by what he’s accomplished so far. At his introductory press conference on Wednesday, he said he was “deeply honored so many teams reached out to me, especially considering I haven’t achieved much in Japan.”

What he hopes to achieve with the Dodgers now is — everything. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts mentioned Sasaki’s goal to be the first Japanese pitcher to win a Cy Young Award. Sasaki’s agent, Joel Wolfe (who also represents Padres pitcher Yu Darvish and the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto), has said Sasaki told him at the start of the process this winter that his goal is to be the best pitcher in baseball.

Toward that end, Sasaki gave every team that he met with a “homework assignment.” His fastball velocity had dropped during the 2024 season in Japan. He wanted the teams courting him to explain why and what they would do about it.

“I thought it was a terrific idea,” Wolfe said.

“The specifics of the homework assignment gave the teams No. 1 a very clear idea of what he wanted to hear because prior to that teams were trying to figure out ‘What should we talk about? What does he want to hear?’ ... One thing we all know is Roki is not a finished product by any stretch. He’s not in the position that Yamamoto was when he came over. He has a lot of growth and learning to do, and he was asking what can you do to help me and what do you think has gone wrong while I was in Japan and how would you go about working with me and developing me? That was a big part of his decision-making process with all the teams.”

Sasaki said he wanted to use the assignment to “understand the differences among the many teams” in the limited time he had to make his choice (Sasaki was made available to MLB teams for a 45-day window by the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan’s Pacific League under the posting agreement between Nippon Professional Baseball and MLB).

“I just felt like this homework assignment would be a really good opportunity for me to see how the teams think,” Sasaki said through Will Ireton, acting as interpreter.

The Dodgers welcomed the assignment as a chance to show off the sophistication of their multipronged approach to developing pitchers. And they felt they aced the test.

“For us, we felt like the homework assignment was right in our wheelhouse,” Friedman said. “Our ability to showcase our performance-science group, our training staff, our performance staff, our pitching coaches, how connected those groups are, we felt like really highlighted a strength of ours. Going through this process, we felt like the most important thing was gonna be to put our best foot forward. And we felt like we did that.”

Sasaki’s decision to sign with the Dodgers (on a minor league contract with a $6.5 million signing bonus) gave them high marks — but the final grade is still to come, Gomes said.

“Last year was an A-plus because we won the World Series,” he said when asked to grade the Dodgers’ offseason this winter. “So we can grade it after.”