The Los Angeles Dodgers are reportedly planning on a strategy without Roki Sasaki moving forward.
Manager Dave Roberts spoke on the mindset of potentially being without the young pitcher in their long-term plan this season.
“We have to plan on life without him at least this year, that’s fair to say,” said the skipper.
Sasaki wasn’t feeling like he could ramp up at the moment, per Roberts, and hasn’t been playing catch for that reason.
The 23-year-old has, however, been in the weight room and working to strengthen his body but throwing a baseball has been out of his recent routine.
Sasaki could only muster 34.1 innings across eight starts to begin his MLB career before a shoulder impingement landed him on the injured list since the middle of April.
Sasaki totalled a 4.72 ERA over this time and showed issues with his command. This was evident in his 24 strikeouts to 22 walks on the year along with an ERA+ of 84 (MLB-average for qualified pitchers is a score of 100).
Perhaps more rest and extended time off will prove to be the best for Sasaki moving forward as his numbers from his time in Nippon Professional Baseball ahead of coming to MLB this past Winter showed extreme amounts of promise.
Across four seasons pitching professionally in Japan, Sasaki went 29-15 with a 2.10 ERA across an impressive 395.2 innings pitched. He totalled 505 strikeouts to just 88 walks and boasted an illustrious splitter.
So far in MLB, his splitter is still proving to be there, generating 14 strikeouts and a swing-and-miss 35 percent of the time, but his fastball velocity being down has been an issue.
An average heater of 96 mph is nothing to bat an eye at and is in the 78th percentile of qualified hurlers, but it has allowed six home runs, 20 hits, and a whiff rate of just 10.1 percent. Sasaki’s walk rate and strikeout rate are both within the bottom 10 percentiles of active pitchers at the fourth and seventh percentiles, respectively.
Whenever the young pitcher comes back to the rubber, both he and the team will hope that his numbers start to trend closer to those from NPB play.
