Roki Sasaki had a rollercoaster of a rookie campaign – losing velo, losing command and losing time on the active roster (due to injury) before being resurrected when he was a reliever late in the season, a role in which he ultimately closed in and played a crucial role in the Dodgers’ successful title defense. It proved to be a temporary role as the club strengthened its armbarn with the high-profile addition of one Edwin Diaz.
Of course Sasaki was a starter in Japan, he started here as a starter, and in a interview with Dylan Hernandez of the California Post, Dave Roberts said the Dodgers would give the lean righty every opportunity to be their fifth or sixth starter. But for The Monster of Reiwa Era to successfully return to that role, Roberts said the 24-year-old still needed to develop a third pitch. Roberts went on to say: “It will have to be something that goes to the left.A tough proposition considering the following: A) Sasaki doesn’t spin the ball exceptionally well, and B) attempts to develop his slider contributed to a forearm angle that messed up his mechanics and caused a drop in fastball velocity.
In fact, when Sasaki took his rehab assignment with Oklahoma City, he aimed to develop a “left-going” pitch while working on a cutter, an offering he threw 21 times before shelving it as a two-pitch reliever. So what about this cutter, and what, if anything, can we glean from what little it threw? Let’s find out.
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First things first, here’s a cutter Roki threw for Triple-A Oklahoma City on September 9, in what would be his final start of the season:
At first glance, hey, not bad. Looks a bit sliding, it’s not the typical horizontal (or even ascending) cutter, and most importantly, it had a whiff to it. The features of the cutter he threw with OKC: It had an average speed of 90.5 MPH, turned at a speed of 1,919 RPM, had an average lateral movement of 0.46 inches and had a rise of 2.74 inches.
This is where I deploy my first bit of silliness, as messing around with such small monsters is often a fruitless endeavor, but I work with what I have, so here goes.
Looking at these pitches in order, Sasaki’s average fastball velocity increases significantly as he approaches his recall to the big club, going from a low of 93.7 MPH on August 14 to a peak average of 98.3 in his final start of the season on September 9 (the 18th and 21st were relief appearances; I’m just looking at the pitch characteristics from the start).
As you might expect, his cutter also saw an increase in speed during that period, going from 87.7 to 90.7.
Hitters across the league saw approximately 53,000 cutters last season. Of those, 6,440 were in the 87-88 MPH range and had a wOBA of .359 against them, while the wOBA dropped to .335 on 8,197 cutters that were in the 90-91 range, so the speed gain was a step in the right direction for Sasaki.
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Speaking of boarding right direction, which is exactly what a few of his blades did, sometimes moving as much as 2 inches to the side of his arm. He actually lost pitches, and that will happen every now and then. That said, with such a small sample size, and with the emphasis here on what the field could possibly look like metrically, I’m going to deploy my next bit of folly and throw away the flops (anything with more than an inch of arm movement) to focus on the successfully thrown cutters (again, as a starter).
*does math*
Well, that now puts Roki’s cutter at an average glove side travel of 2.56 inches (which didn’t seem to have a huge difference on a velo basis), and this is where things get interesting (for me). Leaguewide, hitters saw 385 cutters in the 90-91 range with 2-3 inches of movement on the side of the glove, and their wOBA against them was .383, which is the opposite of progress.
But it might not be something to go into all the way about because if we’re talking spin (segments are my passion), as previously mentioned, Sasaki doesn’t get a huge amount of money.
For the last bit of silliness (that I’m at least aware of), the average spin rate of Sasaki’s successfully thrown cutters was 2,003 RPM, and if he had thrown enough of said cutters to qualify, that would rank 170th out of 171 Major League pitchers. Not great! Or is it?
If we look at the example of cutters from around the league running 90-91 MPH with 2 to 3 inches of movement to the side of the glove and rotating at 1900-2100 RPM, we get a total of only 28 pitches. And the wOBA against those pitches? A measly, measly, tiny .154. That’s not a typo. Wow.
Living by it will be one long order. Speaking of height (throw things at me if you have to), the last component I’m going to look at today is vertical movement in zero gravity. Of the successful cutters Roki threw, they averaged a 5-inch vert. Of the approximately 53,000 cutters thrown last year, only one had the velo, spin and movement, both horizontal and vertical, that resembled the profile Roki presented in Oklahoma City. And wouldn’t you know it, we saw it happen against the Dodgers.
He missed his spot by a plate width, so we can’t even look closely at the only example from last season’s big league that does exist, but Logan Webb finds a way to be annoying at every turn. Meh. (Yes, I could look at more years of stuff, but anyway, I wanted a chance to call Logan Webb annoying, sue me.)
Either way, that result helped the batter’s struggles against cutters with these stats, and that’s what’s important.
There are other considerations too: releasing height and extension, to name two, but already running out of comps, and having already turned what is potentially a nothingburger into a nothingburger luxuryI think this is a good stopping point for a profile that ended up as narrow as Sasaki’s.
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So after looking through all that, we come to a dead end. Or maybe a dead zone? Because when I think of a pitch with little spin, unimpressive velo and not much movement (but possibly more than it should), I think of the Dead Zone slider. Those are pitches that don’t move the way Major League hitters expect, often leaving them a little bewildered. Amir Garrett put together an 8-year Major League career with such pitch a whopping 43.7% of the time, and weird things sometimes make Major League hitters stand out.
I don’t know if there’s something like that going on with Sasaki’s cutter, or if it’s just a small sample sound, but it would be on-brand if a guy with a splitter like no one’s ever seen also ends up bringing something else to the table that’s as rare as a chicken’s teeth. Or maybe it’s just a rough draft of something that, after spending some time polishing it, could look completely different and quickly become outdated.
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Pitchers and catchers report in less than a week, and the first Spring Training game for the Dodgers is on February 23 against the Mariners, so we’re not far away from potentially having this third pitch go “to the left” for us. Unfortunately, Statcast data for complex ball isn’t always available, so we may end up just using our eyes, and even then we probably won’t Real know how things are going until mid-to-late March, when hitters have found their timing and secondary hitters have started hitting.
Until then, we’ll wait with bated breath as the glimpses of dominance we saw last season left Dodger fans with a monstrous appetite for more from Roki Sasaki.
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