Photo: Doug Gray
Earlier on Friday afternoon we found out that the club had signed left-handed pitcher Anthony Misiewicz to a minor league deal and gave him a non-roster invite to big league spring training. It seems that wasn’t the only minor league signing that the team had in the works as outfielder Shane Sasaki has also signed with the Cincinnati Reds. As of now there does not appear to be an invitation to big league camp for him.
Tampa Bay drafted Shane Sasaki back in 2019 out of high school in Hawaii. He spent the first several years of his minor league career in the Rays organization, but he was traded to the Miami Marlins at the end of spring training in 2024 in a 3-team deal that also included current Reds 3rd string catcher Ben Rortvedt (among several other players). Sasaki spent both the 2024 and 2025 seasons in the Marlins farm system, mostly playing in Double-A and Triple-A, though he had short rehab stints at lower levels.
The 25-year-old certainly excels in one area of his game over the rest. He’s been an incredibly effective basestealer in his career. Sasaki has never played 100 games in a given season and only has 374 games to his name in the minor leagues. But despite him having limited games in his six season career he’s 140-for-157 in stolen base attempts. This past year he went 30-for-33 between Double-A Pensacola and Triple-A Jacksonville.
In Triple-A they have Statcast data and with numbers like he’s shown in the stolen base category his sprint speed numbers put him exactly where you’d expect – high up on the list. His fastest sprint speed was 30.6 feet per second and he topped 30.0 16 times in just 23 games. A player who averages 30.0 feet per second is considered to have elite level MLB speed. The sample size is too small to know if that’s truly what he averages, but if he’s not it’s got to be close. That speed also provides value in the outfield where he shows off above-average range in center.
There’s a reason he was a free agent after his age 24 season, though. He’s struggled to hit in the upper minor leagues. After putting up a .904 OPS in Single-A and an .840 OPS in High-A, his OPS dropped to .629 in 139 games at the Double-A level. In his 23 games in Triple-A his OPS has been .558. In 2025 he hit one home run in 350 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A and had just 14 doubles to go along with two triples. You can see his career stats here.
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