Safe to say Roki Sasaki's first taste of Major League Baseball isn't going nearly as well as the Los Angeles Dodgers had hoped. His ERA sits at 4.72 after allowing five runs to the Arizona Diamondbacks over the weekend, and his underlying numbers are somehow even worse. Even more concerning: He's hardly missing any bats, with just 24 strikeouts over his first 34.1 big-league innings.
The main culprit? His once-electric fastball, which routinely touched triple digits in Japan but has dipped as low as 92 or 93 mph at times this season — and currently carries a whiff rate of just 10.1 percent. That heater had been Sasaki's bread and butter, the pitch on which the rest of his arsenal (including his devastating splitter) relied. Which is why the No. 1 item on his wishlist when meeting with teams over the winter was finding the right place to get his velocity back.
Over a month into his time in L.A., he's still searching — and it doesn't seem like the Dodgers have the answers he thought they did.
For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work on The Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB season.
Dodgers failing to follow through on pitch to Roki Sasaki
The Dodgers, for their part, are projecting patience. Manager Dave Roberts immediately batted away the idea that Sasaki might benefit from a stint in the Minor Leagues, telling MLB.com: "There's nothing more impactful than going through a particular experience. He's going through some struggles right now. Major League hitters tell you what adjustments you need to make."
But even amid all that calm, there's a red flag. "When you’re throwing mid-90s, 94 [mph], then you got to really command the baseball," Roberts continued. "So that’s what we’re going to work on as a group."
It was just months ago that the Dodgers apparently convinced Sasaki that they knew how to make his fastball start humming the way it used to. Now, though, they've pivoted, trying get the young righty to adjust to his new reality. And that has to have Sasaki himself feeling a bit adrift: Rather than benefitting from the best analysts and technology the baseball world has to offer, he's continued to regress, and the team that seemed to have all the answers has responded with something of a shrug.
Of course, the Dodgers do have quite the track record when it comes to developing young talent; it's possible this is just a bump in the road, and Sasaki takes the leap sooner rather than later. But if you're the Toronto Blue Jays or any of the other teams that fell short in the Sasaki sweepstakes this past offseason, you have to be shaking your head a bit, as the primary public reason for his decision to head to L.A. seems to have already blown up in his face.