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His command has remained alarmingly inconsistent. His explanations are starting to sound more like excuses.
Roki Sasaki has done little this spring to inspire confidence that he will be an effective starting pitcher this season.
But he will be on the Dodgers’ opening-day roster.
“He’s going to be one of our starters,” manager Dave Roberts told reporters this week.
Asked by Bill Plunkett of the Southern California New Group whether Sasaki was one of the team’s 13 best pitchers, Roberts offered a revealing non-answer.
“He’s going to start the season in the rotation,” Roberts said.
In other words, no.
That doesn’t mean the Dodgers shouldn’t have the unseasoned 24-year-old on their major league roster. Just because they technically have the right to option Sasaki to the minor leagues doesn’t mean they should.
Sasaki trusted them when he chose to play for them. Regardless of whether they believe he will succeed, they now owe their second-year right-hander the same courtesy.
Doing right by Sasaki is in the best interest of everyone involved – for Sasaki, who believes he can start in the major leagues, and for the Dodgers, whose dealings with him could influence how they are viewed by the future Japanese players.
Examining the Dodgers’ position with Sasaki requires revisiting the circumstances under which he was signed.
Because he was only 23 when the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Japanese league made him available to major league teams before the 2025 season, he was classified as an international amateur. As such, Sasaki could only sign a minor league contract.
The bargain price made Sasaki the most desirable Japanese free agent in history outside of Shohei Ohtani.
Yu Darvish and Daisuke Matsuzaka were comparable to Sasaki in stature when they moved stateside, but each cost their original major league teams more than $100 million.
Sasaki could have fetched $200 million on the open market. The Dodgers landed him for just a $6.5-million bonus.
Rules prohibited teams from making any promises to Sasaki about a future contract or roster spot, but the Dodgers had to know they were taking on unspoken responsibilities when they signed him.
Here was a pitcher viewed as arguably the most talented ever produced by his home country, one pursued by other teams as a frontline starter.
The scale of the vision they sold Sasaki became evident at his introductory news conference when president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said he would be part of the rotation from the start of his rookie season. There were mentions of a Cy Young Award and comparisons to Paul Skenes.
Sasaki flopped in the regular season last year.
Maybe it was because his preparation was rushed so that he could start in the Dodgers’ season-opening series in Tokyo. Maybe it was because of the unfamiliar part of the major league game such as the pitch clock or slicker American baseball. Maybe it was the shoulder problem that ended up sidelining him for four months.
Or maybe he just wasn’t as good as the Dodgers thought.
He managed to salvage the year by returning as a reliever in the final week of the regular season.
He became the closer in October, his festive entrance music and 100-mph fastball transforming him into a crowd favorite. While he became less dominant with each passing round of the playoffs, he was without question a major reason why the Dodgers won the World Series.
Something else worth recalling: Sasaki agreed to pitch in relief under the condition that he be given an opportunity to start this year.
The Dodgers are honoring their arrangement, and it’s important they do so.
The reality is that Americans are viewed as particularly untrustworthy in many parts of the world, and that perception is strengthened every time a foreign player and his major league team have entirely dissimilar interpretations of the same deal.
In the case of Sasaki, he obviously expects to be afforded the luxury of treating spring training as a time to experiment in preparation for the regular season rather than to prove anything.
He wouldn’t be the only Japanese player to have treated the exhibition season in this way.
Ichiro Suzuki was famously doubted by his own manager in his first major league camp. Ohtani was compared to a high school hitter in a Yahoo Sports article that quoted several scouts who broke down his miserable Cactus League performance.
Sasaki has a 13.50 earned-run average in three exhibition starts, but he hasn’t sounded concerned.
“If I’m able to pitch the entire season,” Sasaki told reporters after his most recent Cactus League game, “I don’t think anyone will remember spring training.”
The Dodgers are giving him the same chance the Angels once gave Ohtani to prove the skeptics wrong, and why not?
Sasaki is not pushing Tarik Skubal out of the rotation.
Sasaki’s spot comes at the expense of River Ryan, whose workload the team will carefully monitor this year because he is coming back from Tommy John surgery.
What happens from here is entirely up to Sasaki.
He won’t be able to point a finger at the Dodgers for demoting him right as he thought everything was about to come together. He won’t be able to complain about how they didn’t trust him after telling him how much they believed in him.
If he fails, this will be squarely on him.
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