Roki Sasaki chose right when he signed with the Dodgers.
Never mind not being ready to lead the rotation of another team and challenge Shohei Ohtani. The 23-year-old Sasaki doesn’t look ready to pitch in the major leagues.
Sasaki made his second start for the Dodgers on Saturday night, and it was somehow worse than his first. He didn’t make it out of the second inning of a 7-3 victory over the Detroit Tigers at Dodger Stadium, his control problems even more pronounced than they were in his debut in Tokyo.
He recorded only five outs. He walked four. He was charged with three hits and two runs. Of the 61 pitches he threw, only 32 were strikes.
This disheartening start to his major league career — he walked five batters in three innings in his previous start against the Chicago Cubs — shouldn’t sound any alarm bells, but that’s only because he’s playing for the Dodgers.
If Sasaki needs another start or two to get acclimated to the pitch clock or low-quality American baseballs, the Dodgers can afford to give them to him.
If he needs to spend time refining his delivery in the minor leagues, the Dodgers have the necessary depth to cover his absence.
Sasaki won’t have a rookie season like Fernando Valenzuela’s or Dwight Gooden’s, but the Dodgers don’t need him to. The Dodgers are World Series favorites with or without him, and they have the luxury of treating him as if he’s a prospect without compromising their championship ambitions.
His circumstances would be completely different if he’d signed with another team. On the San Diego Padres, he probably would have started the season as the No. 3 starter. Him pitching like this would have erased whatever chance the Padres had of dethroning the Dodgers in the National League West. The pressure to perform would be greater by several orders of magnitude.
However, there is a downside to not being needed, as Sasaki is with the Dodgers, which is that a player can be forgotten. Around this time last year, Bobby Miller was viewed as a star in the making. Miller didn’t have the season the Dodgers envisioned, as his performance declined and his health failed him. He started this season with the franchise’s triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City.
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