Mike Gambino and Penn State baseball made headlines on Monday, earning the commitment of top Japanese prospect Genei Sato.

Welcome to Happy Valley, Genei Sato!#WeAre pic.twitter.com/BlGNx3Yykg

— Penn State Baseball (@PennStateBASE) December 22, 2025

Sato, a right-handed pitcher, plans to depart Japan in the spring to enroll at the university to take summer classes. He intends to join the baseball team in 2027. The 21-year-old previously played at Sendai University, posting a 2.22 ERA in 170.1 innings with 202 strikeouts to just 62 walks.

He boasts a high-90s fastball that will immediately make him one of the hardest-throwing pitchers in the Big Ten, flashing a consistent 94-97 mph on the radar gun when starting, but able to flash near-triple digits when coming out of the bullpen. He complements his ferocious fastball with a hard, low-90s splitter that fooled top U.S. collegiate hitters at an all-star event in July, striking out six in 4.1 innings, including a strikeout of projected No. 1 overall pick Roch Cholowsky.

Sendai University RHP Genei Sato is transferring to a U.S. school in February to become MLB Draft eligible.

The top prospect impressed with a fastball topping at 99 mph in the Japan-US Collegiate All-Star Series this July.

pic.twitter.com/MslhDqgmPm

— Yakyu Cosmopolitan (@yakyucosmo) December 15, 2025

Sato was a projected first-round pick in the 2026 Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) Draft before electing to go overseas. How much eligibility he will have with the Nittany Lions is unclear, but he will be eligible to be selected in the 2027 MLB Draft.

Typically, Japanese baseball players almost exclusively stay in Japan until they are 25, regardless of their talent. Players can be drafted out of high school or college into NPB, but they would be unable to go overseas to get an MLB contract until they turn 25, in which they’d be subject to the posting system, one that notable players such as Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro Suzuki, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have gone through.

Sato is pursuing a different path, however. In recent years, highly-touted young Japanese pitchers are electing to pursue MLB earlier in a few different fashions.

Los Angeles Dodgers closer Roki Sasaki pushed to be posted at just 22 years old before the 2025 season, but unlike Ohtani and others signing rich contracts, he signed a smaller international free agent deal that has him on a rookie MLB contract. That same offseason, the Athletics gave top Japanese high school prospect Shotaro Morii, to a seven-figure signing bonus to come straight to America from high school, bypassing both college and NPB.

Stanford first baseman Rintaro Sasaki, Chicago White Sox prospect Rikuu Nishida, and Georgia two-way player Kenny Ishikawa, however, have elected to do the same as Sato in the past, bypassing the NPB to go to America early by committing to an American college.

Sato joins a long list of international top prospects to join a Penn State program in 2025, notably No. 1 NHL prospect Gavin McKenna (Canada), world champion freestyle wrestler Masanosuke Ono (Japan), and several European freshmen for Penn State men’s basketball.