Yankees' meeting with Japanese HS ace Shoki Oda had 1 key difference from competitors

Will the New York Yankees be able to overcome the hurdle of Not Being the Los Angeles Dodgers and convince Japanese high school ace Shoki Oda to come join them anyway? If they're going to pull it off, they got off to a pretty great and thorough start overnight Wednesday.

The Yankees reportedly sent a six-man contingent to Japan to convince the available flamethrower to forego being drafted by the Yomiuri Giants (sorry, new manager Hideki Matsui) and leap directly to the American professional ranks rather than going to college.

It'll be an uphill battle to do so, but if the Yankees pull it off, they might have Sam Briend to thank. He's the Yankees' director of pitching, and his presence in the Yanks' traveling party made them the only franchise so far to send a member of their behind-the-scenes pitching development pipeline to the meeting.

If all that matters is which teams Oda follows on Instagram, the Yankees have no chance. But if he's genuinely invested in growing and improving rather than being blinded by the fully finished products the Dodgers have absorbed in recent years, then maybe he'll choose a different path.

Dodgers have dominated Japanese market, but failed in the area Yankees are hoping to exploit

There is no one like Shohei Ohtani. There is no one like Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a man whose ridiculous warmup and training routine the Dodgers never dared to mess with. Imagine the Yankees having a $325 million ace who's still allowed to throw javelins? Every player is always evolving, to some extent, but these Japanese superstars both arrived on the Dodgers' doorstep nearly fully formed.

That was not the case with Roki Sasaki. One of the most ballyhooed international prospects of all time, Sasaki begged all interested teams to come to him with a detailed plan for fixing his fastball, which had begun to betray him. He was clearly convinced by the Dodgers' pitch (or, again, tantalized by their star power), but the results have not been there thus far in Los Angeles — or should we say Oklahoma City, where he's been mired from time to time over two scuffle-filled seasons. Sasaki rode a lucky month to a shining role out of the bullpen for the Dodgers in October 2025, but he's hardly been the ace that was prescribed. He's been a developmental prospect who often spirals and cannot command his heat, posting FIPs of 5.70 and 4.73 in two big-league seasons ahead of Year 3 and a lockout.

Sasaki's is the case the Yankees needed to identify and counter in their meeting with Oda, and bringing Briend and his philosophy along was the cleanest way to do so.

"What I want to emphasize is that signing him isn’t what matters. Succeeding together is," Briend reportedly told the gathered media after the Yankees' meeting with Oda. That is the crux of how they might be able to pull off the upset here. If they're going to make inroads, they need to sell a fuller picture, emphasize their recent successes, and maybe, just maybe, doing so will cast subtle doubt on the Dodgers' similar failures.

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