Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I lost track of how many times I laughed out loud watching the video of the college baseball team that gave up 23 runs in an inning.
In today’s SI:AM:
🔥 Sasaki’s debut
⚾ MLB’s best youngsters
🏈 Quarterback conundrum
He brought the heat
It’s rare that spring training debuts come with as much hype as Roki Sasaki’s first appearance for the Los Angeles Dodgers did, but Sasaki isn’t your typical MLB rookie.
Sasaki pitched his first game in Dodger blue on Tuesday, coming out of the bullpen in relief of fellow Japanese star Yoshinobu Yamamoto to pitch three scoreless innings. He allowed two hits, one walk and struck out five. He blew hitters away with his fastball, embarrassed them with his splitter and left them flailing at his slider. He was exactly as good as advertised.
“That’s the best we’ve seen him,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters. “And you would expect that, given he’s now really in compete mode, the adrenaline is real.”
Roberts added that Sasaki was throwing harder than he had during any of his bullpen sessions this spring. Of the 46 pitches Sasaki threw, 25 were fastballs, 14 of which were over 98 mph and four of which topped 99 mph.
“We haven’t seen 99 all spring,” Roberts said.
Then there was his already-legendary splitter. Sasaki threw his signature pitch 18 times and got hitters to swing at it 10 times. Only one hitter managed to make contact with it—Jake Fraley, who flied out to center field.
“The split, he throws it hard,” Roberts said. “It looks like a fastball. Some break straight down. Some go to the left. Some go to the right. It’s tough to obviously square it up because you just don’t know what it’s going to do.”
Of all the faces in new places this MLB season, Sasaki has to be the most fascinating. The 23-year-old was the subject of a heated free agent bidding war this winter. Because his signing was restricted by MLB’s rules on international “amateur” free agents (even though Sasaki played four professional seasons in Japan), more teams felt they had a chance to sign him than if he had waited until he was a true free agent and could command a $300 million dollar contract. He ended up signing with the Dodgers, which had long been expected, but the bidding war raised his profile among fans of other teams.
Sasaki was excellent during his time with the Chiba Lotte Marines, posting a 2.02 ERA and 5.76 strikeout-to-walk ratio, so it’s no surprise that he was such a hot commodity when he decided to make the jump to MLB this winter. But he’s also widely regarded as an unfinished product, despite his success in Japan and his intimidating arsenal. He has never pitched more than 130 innings in a season, so one of the biggest challenges for the Dodgers will be managing his workload. More troublingly, though, his average fastball velocity dipped last season from 99 mph the year before to 97 mph, a worrisome development for a young pitcher with a history of injuries. So it was a positive sign to see Sasaki bringing the heat in his first outing of the spring. Now we’ll just have to wait to see if he’s as dominant when the games start to count for real.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Roki Sasaki Lives Up to the Hype in Spring Debut.
