The Los Angeles Dodgers won the Roki Sasaki sweepstakes this past offseason for many reasons, but perhaps most notably was the ‘unspecified homework assignment’ decoding why Sasaki’s fastball velocity had dropped a season prior in Nippon Professional Baseball.
In an almost ironic twist, one of his major issues during his rookie year with L.A. has been his fastball velocity dipping.
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During Sasaki’s professional career in Japan, he dominated the strike zone with a 5.74 strikeout-to-walk ratio and a 2.10 ERA over four years in NPB play.
Although it’s just a sample size to start his MLB career, Sasaki has a 4.72 ERA with 24 strikeouts to 22 walks through eight games. His past three outings have seen an average fastball velocity of 96.1 mph, and it’s dropped to 94.8 mph in his two most recent starts.
Friday’s start didn’t see a strikeout from Sasaki; there were just two walks and as many home runs allowed, as his night ended with five earned runs off of five hits in four innings.
The 23-year-old spoke on trying to figure out what’s been going on with his heater.
“Just really still in this process of finding out what the root cause (is), working with my coaches, talking to people about this,” Sasaki said. “I’m not quite exactly sure and can’t really state exactly the single reason.”
Pitching coach Mark Prior gave his own reasoning as to why the fastball speed from the phenom may be a little lower than usual.
“Roki, everybody knows he throws 100,” Prior said. “He’s not throwing 100 with us. That’s something that I think he was trying to train and get to it, which we tried to help as much as we could. But he also felt like it affected his command tremendously in those first couple outings.”
Command is something that Sasaki seems to be struggling with to start his MLB career, and if a few more miles per hour are hindering that, perhaps the young right-hander has to learn to up his command before he is able to up his speed again.
One of the best parts of the Sasaki sweepstakes is that he is only 23 years old. By his own agent’s admission, he is not a finished project, but has the desire to keep learning and get back to that superstar in NPB in a Dodgers uniform.
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Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
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