The Athletics signed 18-year-old Shotaro Morii to a $1,510,500 deal, the largest ever for a Japanese amateur outside of the country’s Nippon Professional Baseball. Morii decided to skip the NPB ...

First baseman Rintaro Sasaki, for example, is at Stanford. Two-way player Shotaro Morii recently signed with the Athletics out of high school. “There’s drips,” Stearns said. “I don’t ...

Hoping to become a two-way player in Major League Baseball just like Shohei Ohtani, 18-year-old Shotaro Morii made the rare decision to bypass Japanese professional baseball entirely and agreed ...

The crack of the bat is almost here with Opening Day for the 2025 Major League Baseball season set for March 27. But while MLB has become known for its melting pot of backgrounds among players, this ...

This popularity has led to some Japanese ballplayers going straight to MLB. Shotaro Morii, 18, and Rintaro Sasaki, 19, "moved directly to American baseball, bypassing [Nippon] restrictions and ...

Two young stars – 19-year-old Rintaro Sasaki and 18-year-old Shotaro Morii – have made an early move to the U.S. Sasaki is a slugging first baseman who plays at Stanford while Morii is a ...

TOKYO (AP) — Shohei Ohtani is widely regarded as the best player in Major League Baseball, and Ichiro Suzuki enters the Hall of Fame later this year, reminders that some of the top talent in ...

But times are changing. Two young stars — 19-year-old Rintaro Sasaki and 18-year-old Shotaro Morii — have moved directly to American baseball, bypassing NPB restrictions and unwritten societal norms ...