Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Roki Sasaski, one of the winter’s most sought-after free agents, earned the first win of his Major League Baseball career on Saturday night as part of a blowout victory against the Atlanta Braves (box score). He had previously held an 0-1 record on the season through his first six starts. (Won-loss record is, of course, an antiquated metric that does a poor job of capturing how well a starting pitcher has performed.)
Sasaki, 23, logged five innings on Saturday, surrendering three runs on six hits and two walks. He also struck out four of the 24 batters he faced. On the season, he’s now sporting a 3.86 ERA (102 ERA+) and a 1.20 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 30 ⅓ frames. Saturday’s start marked the fourth consecutive that he’s worked through at least five innings — that after he tallied fewer than nine innings over the course of his first three starts.
CBS Sports recently detailed why Sasaki remains a work in progress:
On that last note, Sasaki’s four-seam fastball has validated the concerns about its dead-zone properties — essentially, that it breaks the same amount vertically and horizontally, making it easier for batters to track. Opponents are hitting only .244 against the pitch, but that comes with a nearly 90% contact rate and with some poor deserved metrics. It’s also worth pointing out that Sasaki’s fastball doesn’t grade so well in the eyes of the pitch-quality models.
The Dodgers signed Sasaki over the winter, when he was posted by the Choba Lotte Marines of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league. Sasaki didn’t meet age and service-time requisites to qualify as a true free agent, meaning that he was classified as an amateur and had a ceiling placed on his earning potential. The Dodgers were nevertheless able to woo him despite not having the benefit of their financial might.
With Saturday’s victory, the Dodgers are now 23-10 on the season, putting them in first place in the National League West with a 1 ½ game advantage over the San Diego Padres (-500 to win the division, per BetMGM). Los Angeles’ plus-43 run differential is the third highest in the NL, trailing only the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs.
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