The Los Angeles Dodgers have been plagued with pitching woes all season long, but the most recent update on Roki Sasaki has been puzzling, to say the least.
One day after manager Dave Roberts said that it was ‘fair to say’ to plan for Sasaki being out for an extended period of time, general manager Brandon Gomes provided more context on the 23-year-old’s absence.
“He threw some plyo balls today, so arm is moving. Feeling good coming out of that, so now it’s continuing to build a foundation and make sure we get him to a point where he’s feeling good throwing and then go from there,” Gomes said. “What that looks like, it’s still very early in the process. But, (he) felt good coming out of today, which was a positive, so we’ll hopefully keep building off of that.”
On Friday, another twist came in Sasaki’s injury saga as the rookie has officially restarted his throwing program.
Sasaki has been sidelined with shoulder discomfort, which then escalated to landing on the injured list with a shoulder impingement on April 16.
The right-hander dazzled the mound in Nippon Professional Baseball the last four seasons and was a highly sought-after prospect when he planned to make the jump to MLB this past winter. His 2.10 ERA across his career in Japan, hasn’t exactly translated to North America as he posted just a 4.72 ERA in his first eight starts with the Dodgers.
One of the main draws regarding Sasaki, besides being just 23 years old and attaining a career 5.76 strikeout-to-walk ratio in NPB, was his splitter. Although his command and ERA haven’t shown their full potential in his first handful of MLB starts, the splitter has remained strong.
Hitters have just a .158 batting average against it and are swinging and missing at that offering 35 percent of the time, the two best marks of his three-pitch arsenal. His fastball velocity is in the 78th percentile of active pitchers, which is far from average, but batters have a .258 average against it.
The hope is that as his shoulder recovers, the heater speed will once again be fooling opposing batters and the legend of Sasaki will be fulfilled in a Dodgers uniform.
