It’s in him.
He’s shown it.
Somewhere inside of Roki Sasaki, there are qualities of a frontline starter.
Here’s something else that’s equally certain: Sasaki has no control over his gifts.
As much as he said he’s become more familiar with the intricacies of a delivery that used to perform without thinking, it’s clear he still doesn’t really know what he’s doing.
Sasaki might have a general idea about what he has to do to, say, generate velocity, but he doesn’t understand the concepts well enough to where he can feel them in his body.
He’s not Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
In the wake of his three-inning, six-run implosion on Thursday night in the Dodgers’ 12-7 victory over the San Diego Padres, the question isn’t whether Sasaki has lost his feel.
He obviously has.
The question is about what the Dodgers should do with him now that he’s been charged with 19 runs in 17 innings over his last four starts.
With Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow still on the injured list, manager Dave Roberts said Sasaki would take his next turn in the rotation.
“I just don’t think right now we have another alternative,” Roberts said.
Roberts offered a possible explanation for why Sasaki was hit as hard as he was.
“They were on everything Roki threw,” Roberts said. “You could see it. Everything. I don’t know if he was tipping his pitches, but they were on everything.”
Sasaki said that while it was possible the Padres knew what he was about to throw, there were other reasons they whacked him.
“I think the poor quality of pitches I threw was also a factor,” Sasaki said in Japanese.
Credit Sasaki for not burying his head in the sand. The first step in correcting a problem is to acknowledge there is one, and Sasaki did that – to a degree.
For the second consecutive start, Sasaki failed to crack 100 mph with his fastball. For the second consecutive start, his average fastball velocity was less than 98 mph.
Which could be why, unlike in some of his previous starts, he was punished when he threw the pitch down the middle.
Sasaki gave up a leadoff double to Fernando Tatis Jr. on a fastball. Two batters later, he served up a two-run homer to Manny Machado – also on a fastball.
That forced Sasaki to rely more on his off-speed pitches, but they were hit as well.
“What stood out was the hard contact,” Sasaki said.
He gave up three homers, including one each by Jackson Merrill and Jake Cronenworth in the Padres’ four-run second inning.
All seven hits charged to him were extra-base hits.
While Sasaki said the pitches that were hit weren’t well-executed, he thought he threw the ball decently on the whole. He said he thought he was better than he was six days earlier when the Padres scored three runs in four innings against him in San Diego.
“I thought it was a conviction thing with Roki,” catcher Dalton Rushing said. “I don’t think his stuff was too far off. You gotta attack the strike zone.
“I think it’s a mindset thing.”
Roberts sounded concerned about the entire package, from the diminished velocity to the potential pitch-tipping.
“We’ll probably look at everything,” Roberts said.
Sasaki is back to where he was at the start of the season, but the Dodgers won’t look at the possibility of sending him to the minor leagues or skipping his turn in the rotation – at least for now.
At this stage, what would be the point?
They let him start games for them early in the season when he was as out of sorts as he is now.
Might as well let him stay the course and try to catch lightning in a bottle again, just as he did in a late-May start against the Philadelphia Phillies. That was the first of four starts in a row in which he broke the 100-mph threshold and registered an average fastball velocity of more than 98 mph.
The clock is ticking on Sasaki, who has a 5.40 earned-run average. Once Snell and Glanow come back, the Dodgers might not be able to continue sending him out to the mound every six or seven days in hopes of him magically finding himself again.
Sasaki has until then to convince the Dodgers he can help them in October, whether it be as a starter or reliever. Right now, his volatility makes him hard to trust in any role.
