Friday start will be ‘good test’ for Dodgers’ Roki Sasaki

He was down.

Then up.

Now, Roki Sasaki is down again.

Seven days ago, the 24-year-old Sasaki had his worst start of a season that has included several stinkers.

In the first 4 ⅓ innings of an 8-2 loss to the White Sox, Sasaki was charged with seven runs.

Which is why manager Dave Roberts is curious to see how Sasaki will respond in his scheduled start Friday night against the Orioles.

“It is a good test for a young player that after he has one like this, how he responds,” Roberts said.

On the surface, it might seem as if Sasaki has relapsed into his early-season form that had me calling for him to be sent to the minor leagues to rebuild his delivery from scratch.

But he hasn’t.

He’s an entirely different pitcher now.

Back then, he was searching — searching for his fastball, searching for his identity as a pitcher.

He has since rediscovered what he was looking for.

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“In that sense, to some degree, I fixed what I had to fix in the spring,” he said in Japanese.

As Sasaki has evolved, so have the questions he has to answer.

The question now isn’t whether he can still touch 100 mph with his heater or throw it for strikes.

He’s proven he can.

What he has to show now is that he can win a game in which his off-speed pitches aren’t working.

Or that he can shut down a team that’s not the Angels.

Or that he can mentally recover from the kind of beating to which he was subjected last week in Chicago.

“What I have to fix,” Sasaki said, “has changed.”

But as Sasaki reflected on his loss to the White Sox, he sounded considerably more upbeat than he was when he was getting knocked around early in the season.

He was no longer a pitcher who was in the midst of an existential crisis.

He was a pitcher who just got beat.

He threw pitches that were clocked at more than 100 mph for the third consecutive game. His average fastball velocity of 98.8 mph and his maximum velocity of 100.7 mph were both season bests.

Before rediscovering his fastball during a May 30 start against the Phillies, Sasaki was forced to rely on get-me-over breaking balls to get through his starts. He was relieved to not have to do that anymore.

“I don’t think I’ll have much of a future if I just try to get through the game in front of me by tricking the opponent,” Sasaki said. “If I can’t deliver what they saw in me [in Japan], I won’t be able to compete here.”

In Chicago, he still had his trademark fastball, and that allowed him to limit the damage to a run over the first four innings.

But his problem with his other pitches — most notably his splitter — led to him completely unraveling in the fifth inning. 

He walked the leadoff batter, gave up three consecutive hits, struck out a batter and walked two more. He was replaced at that point by Blake Treinen.

Because Sasaki was going through the White Sox’s order for the third time, he wanted to give them different looks and mixed in more breaking balls. But the pitches didn’t just miss. They also messed up his control of his fastball.

“I think I had one of my better days in terms of velocity,” Sasaki said. “That was good. But overall, including my ability to incorporate my breaking balls, I’m not there yet. When I’m facing a lineup that’s in good form, I think the results will be like that if I can’t pitch well. I think I have to practice to be able to hold them even when I’m like that.”

Now that he’s right, now that he’s pitching like himself again, Sasaki will start the process that most Japanese pitchers undergo when they move to the major leagues. 

He will start to figure out what he can get away with and what he can’t. He will learn how to compete at this level.

“I think that I still need in-game trial and error,” he said.

The start in Chicago wasn’t a step back. Rather, it was the start of the next phase of his development.