Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz examine the 2026 debut pitching for Roki Sasaki after a disastrous Spring Training. Hear the full conversation on the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast – and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
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Video Transcript
Yeah, he was way better than I or most people expected.
Roqui was coming off a disastrous spring training.
We’re talking ERA that starts with a one and a four.
No, a one and a five.
He was awful in spring.
He did not deserve to be in the rotation.
The Dodgers were keeping him there partially out of loyalty for him choosing them in the first place, partially so that I guess they could keep an eye on him and help him develop, and they were able to do that because the Dodgers are gonna fall ass backwards into 95 wins because their team is so good.
And so he rolled out there, for his first start, and I was texting people like, “Hey, over under five and a half outs.”
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And Roqui was fine.
He worked into the fifth inning, completed four.
There were bouts of wildness.
I think that if he was facing a better lineup, it could have gone worse.
There were a ton of non-competitive pitches.
But the big development for him was the introduction of a third pitch that looks to be pretty sticky.
I think he’s gonna keep that cutter around.
It’s an odd pitch.
It’s more like up and down than you usually see from a cutter, but he just needed another offering to keep guys off balance, keep them off the fastball and the split.
All things considered, this was definitely a step in the right direction.
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He looked like a major league pitcher, which he hadn’t in spring training, and he didn’t for large swaths of last season.
Yeah, the, the third pitch is everything.
Well, it’s not everything because the fastball command still has to improve, and he has to figure out a way to- Yeah land a splitter to some degree as nasty as the movement really is.
but that was a pitcher that you can work with.
Something tangible changed that you can build off.
I think that is the importance of the cutter.
You’re not just going back and trying the same thing over and over to, to no effect.
So I think that was certainly encouraging with Mr. Sasaki.