STANFORD, Calif. — About 45 minutes before the Stanford baseball team would play its home opener against Washington in late February, a group of about 10 men congregated on the steps near the Cardinal dugout down the first-base line at Sunken Diamond.

It was a scene that might have seemed normal before a Major League Baseball game, but in this case the autograph seekers were yelling the name of a 19-year-old freshman, who had just made his college baseball debut the previous week.

“Rintaro! Rintaro!”

They were hoping to get the attention of college baseball’s next big thing: Rintaro Sasaki, a power-hitting legend of Japanese high school baseball, who rewrote the record books with 140 home runs. During his high school career, Sasaki played for his dad, who years earlier also coached Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani and Los Angeles Angels pitcher Yusei Kikuchi at the same school. For years, it was assumed in Japan that Sasaki would take the same route Ohtani did by going No. 1 overall in the Nippon Professional Baseball draft and quickly ascend to a roster in the country’s top professional league.

Instead, he decided to chart a new path, by becoming the first top prospect to ever bypass the NPB in favor of college baseball in the United States.

“I’m not sure if I should say this, but I think this decision was unprecedented, so it probably caught people by surprise,” Sasaki said through a translator in early February. “Of course, the path I want to take probably has its pros and cons. But the most important thing I don’t want to let go of is making sure I put my all into what I want to do.”

Over the past month and a half, Sasaki’s introduction to college baseball has had its ups and downs. He’s hitting .267 with four home runs in 135 at-bats, and while those aren’t the numbers of a generational superstar, they align with what Stanford coach David Esquer laid out in the way of expectations with ESPN before the season.

“We’ve had first-round draft picks or players who have left here as first-round draft picks who were not dominant immediately upon dropping on a college diamond,” Esquer said. “So, the expectation that Rintaro just becomes this dominant figure immediately is a little unfair, and that’s not what we expect of him.

“I’m well aware that baseball is a journey.”

For Sasaki, it’s a journey he fully controls — one he hopes will lead him to the MLB.

“This life belongs to me, so I don’t want others to decide it for me,” he said.

HIGH SCHOOL BASEBALL in Japan is a big deal. Think high school football in Texas, maybe bigger.

The annual national tournament, commonly referred to as the Summer Koshien, is one of the biggest sporting events in the country. It is televised nationally, and during the final two-week stage, it regularly draws roughly 50,000 fans at Hanshin Koshien Stadium. For future pros, it’s a rite of passage, with the likes of Ichiro Suzuki, Yu Darvish and Ohtani — and just about every other future MLB star — having participated in their youth.

A Japanese high school season is roughly 80 games, and when Sasaki’s school, Hanamaki High, advanced in the tournament his senior year in 2023, he had already smashed the national home run record (in about 240 games over three years). That feat placed him in the spotlight in a way that had rarely — maybe never — been seen for a baseball player his age in Japan. Media followed him around. He was noticed on the street. NPB stardom was sure to follow, it seemed.

But late in the season, Sasaki started thinking about his dreams differently.

“The moment I realized that coming to the U.S. is an option hit me around my senior year of high school,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking too much about it at the time. It was my last season, so that was where all my focus was.”

If he went the traditional route and made himself available for the NPB draft, Sasaki likely would have been fast-tracked to the NPB and earned the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars a year. Media endorsements would have followed. It would have been an enviable position for just about every other high school player in Japan.

After the thought of playing college baseball in the U.S. did cross his mind, though, Sasaki couldn’t shake it. He liked the idea of the adventure, and a top-tier American university education was appealing.

Some of the early speculation about Sasaki’s decision to play college baseball was that it was related to the pathway from NPB to MLB. Had Sasaki gone the Japanese pro route, he would have been required to wait eight years before becoming a free agent to sign with an MLB team. The more common path for top Japanese stars to make their way to MLB, however, is through the “posting system,” which allows MLB teams to bid on Japanese players, then negotiate with them. If a contract is agreed upon, the Japanese team gets a percentage of the value of the player’s contract (usually between 15-20%).

The Japanese team is able to use its own discretion to decide when — if at all — to make a player available through this system. After Ohtani was drafted No. 1 in the 2012 NPB draft, he played five seasons in Japan before landing with the Los Angeles Angels via the posting system.

Sasaki’s potential pathway will look much different. He’ll be subjected to the same rules as American players who play at four-year schools and will be eligible for the MLB first-year player draft in 2026.

But the possibility of a shorter path to the big leagues, Sasaki said, was not a motivating factor.

“Doing what I wanted to do for myself is the main reason I came here,” Sasaki said. “No one knows what’ll come next. If things go well, maybe [MLB] could happen. But I also might not go. The biggest reason I came is to play baseball here at Stanford while also studying, gaining experience from both sides. I came here since it would be a good experience for me. That’s how I feel.”

Having grown up watching Ohtani and Kikuchi play for his dad, Sasaki was uniquely positioned to understand his options.

“Even now, I want to catch up to [Ohtani] as much as possible, so I use him as motivation to work hard,” Sasaki said. “My dream is to join [Ohtani and Kikuchi] in the end, who are playing in the MLB, and stand on the same field to either play together with them or face off against them.”

When he made the decision to come to the U.S., Sasaki was connected with Junpei Tomonaga, who now has served as an advisor and occasional interpreter for Sasaki and his family for the past year and a half. Tomonaga played collegiate baseball in Japan and enrolled at USC in 1990, and he stayed in the Los Angeles area ever since. For the past 25 years, Tomonaga has worked as a liaison between USA Baseball and the Japan University Baseball Federation.

He is well-versed in the sport in both countries, and he became a sounding board for Sasaki to better understand the landscape.

“I think I’m more impressed with him as a human being, not as an athlete,” Tomonaga said. “Obviously, he’s a top baseball player. But the thing that impressed me was his personality. He likes the challenge. He didn’t take the easiest path.”

Eventually, Sasaki settled on four possible schools: Vanderbilt, UCLA, Cal and Stanford. He visited each of them, and Stanford felt right.

“There’s no doubt that this is one of the world’s top universities,” Sasaki said through an interpreter. “Just simply, I wanted to try being a pro baseball athlete and student here. That was the biggest reason. And of course, there’s the environment as well. The environment for baseball, including the coach and the players. Playing here with all that included, I wanted to live my life in a way that would lead me to my next big step.”

At home, Sasaki’s decision was met with a mixed reaction.

“A lot of people admire this challenge and respected that,” Tomonaga said. “But other people say, ‘Oh, he’s not going to be successful,’ ‘His power will be average in the U.S.’ Those are some of the negative comments.”

STANFORD CATCHER CHARLIE Saum was scrolling Instagram when he first learned of the Legend of Rintaro.

“I saw a video on Instagram of him hitting a ball probably 500 feet, one of his many home runs in Japan, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,'” Saum said. “And then I found out he’s coming to America to play college baseball.”

Saum was curious, so he went to Stanford assistant coach Thomas Eager, the program’s recruiting coordinator, and asked if they were going to make a run at him. He was told they would, and about a month later, Saum hosted Sasaki on his campus visit.

“I was able to show him around, take him to class, get breakfast, him and his family,” Saum said. “They’re great people.”

Esquer had become aware of Sasaki mostly through social media.

“But it was also Coach Eager saying, ‘Hey, listen, how would you like to have this in your lineup?'” Esquer said. “I have great respect for Japanese baseball. My feeling is that the level of play there is equal to what we’re doing here in many senses.

“Then you heard about his background, that he came from the same school as Ohtani, that his dad coached both of them. It was kind of a no-brainer that this would be someone that we feel that could play and play immediately in the United States and could certainly help us.”

The Japanese school system is on a different calendar than the U.S., which allowed Sasaki to enroll at Stanford in time for the spring quarter in 2024. He would have been eligible to play for the Cardinal after he arrived, but with all of the adjustments in his life, it was decided to let him acclimate for the rest of the year as opposed to throwing him in during the middle of the season.

“It just didn’t make sense, but we felt it did make sense to kind of integrate him in all our practices, take him on the road, get him to experience what being a member of the team is like,” Esquer said. “And we find out really quickly, he’s really competitive. He took our losses hard, and he celebrated our wins just as much as any regular member of the team. So it was pretty awesome to watch him just become part of it so quickly.”

Sasaki is conversational in English now — he insisted he conduct most of his interview with ESPN in English — but when he first came to visit, the language barrier was difficult. He grew up taking English in school, but any foundation that education provided he didn’t feel helped much, early on.

“It shows a lot about his character, and the kid’s really brave,” Saum said. “When he first showed up, the English was a little rough and that made it a little tough for him. But I was fortunate to room with him on the road last year early on, and we’d just have Google translate conversations back and forth, and those moments were really fun, and it’s getting a lot better now. And now he’s laughing and joking around with the guys and it’s great.”

When it came to baseball, Esquer said there wasn’t much lost in translation.

“That’s one thing you knew right away. He understands baseball,” Esquer said. “We threw him right in the middle of practices — going over to bunt defenses and just assignments — he was very adept. You tell him that this is what we do and this is where you go. He picks it up quickly and communicates as a first baseman when it’s communicating with the pitcher on defense and those types of things. He’s not a shy baseball player.”

It was also evident right away that Sasaki’s presence on the team was going to draw attention in a way that wasn’t common in college baseball. He would be recognized at airports and autograph seekers would approach him.

“Those people knew where he was at all times, really,” Saum said. “We’d get off the bus to go to a game and there would be a crowd of people waiting for him.”

But Sasaki was also intent on adjusting to life in the U.S. away from baseball. He’s serious about his studies. He rides his e-bike around Stanford’s sprawling campus. He orders double-doubles and animal-style fries from In-N-Out.

“The first time we took him [to In-N-Out] he tried Root Beer for the first time, I’ll never forget the look on his face, jaw dropped,” Saum said. “He’s like, ‘This is my new favorite thing.'”

Conversely, his teammates seek out his approval on local Japanese fare.

“There’s a lot of sushi places around here in Palo Alto, and I’ll ask him like, ‘Hey, is this a good spot? And he’ll be like, ‘No, don’t go there,'” Saum said. “He gives me the drop on the good sushi places to get right on. He knows his stuff.”

BEFORE THE SEASON began, Sasaki was named Baseball America’s Preseason National Freshman of the Year. It’s a speculative honor, of course, but it added to the already sky-high expectations for Sasaki.

Over the first few weeks of the season, his performance was encouraging. He hit safely in 11 of his first 13 games and had 14 RBIs over 11 games. But the vaunted home-run power took some time to warm up.

Finally, Sasaki went yard in the 17th game of the season, doing so twice against Duke in an 11-1 win on March 15 (the second one ended the game due to the 10-run rule). He homered again against Duke the next day and a few days later against Cal, but he has since found himself mired in the first slump of his college career.

IT’S A WALK-OFF RUN-RULE VICTORY!@rintarosasaki connects for his second of the day to win it 11-1

📺 » ACC Network Extra | #GoStanford pic.twitter.com/rxFK50uhon

— Stanford Baseball (@StanfordBSB) March 15, 2025

Sasaki has only 7 hits in his past 53 at-bats and only two RBIs in that stretch. During the recent slump, Sasaki has seen his batting average drop from .378 to .267. It has coincided with a difficult stretch for Stanford as a team, too.

After it broke into the top 25 with a hot 15-3 start, Stanford (18-14, 6-12 ACC) has taken a step back in ACC play. The team lost 11 of its past 12 conference games, having been swept by Georgia Tech, Virginia and Cal. The Cardinal did take the last game over top-10 ranked Clemson over the weekend, and they are hoping to build more momentum against Notre Dame this Friday.

But in the end, it’s all part of what Sasaki knew would be a challenging journey.

“I’m carrying Japan’s pride on my back, and I’m getting a lot of attention,” Sasaki said. “So I’d like to play with my head up high.”