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SURPRISE, Ariz. — The flashes are undeniable. So, too, are the growing pains.
On a cool Tuesday night at Surprise Stadium, Roki Sasaki delivered another outing that felt like a snapshot of his entire spring: electric in stretches, scattered in others, and ultimately unfinished.
The right-hander opened with purpose against the Kansas City Royals, carving through three scoreless innings with a tempo and intensity that had been inconsistent in prior outings. His fastball had life, his splitter flashed bite, and for a moment, the version of Sasaki the Dodgers envisioned looked firmly in place.
Then came the fourth.
After reentering, Sasaki’s command wavered. A two-run homer quickly erased the clean line, and three consecutive balls forced manager Dave Roberts and a trainer to the mound. It was a familiar scene this spring — brief dominance interrupted by sudden instability.
But Sasaki didn’t unravel.
He nodded as Roberts approached, insisting on staying in the game. Moments later, he fielded a slow comebacker and calmly ran it to first himself, ending the inning with a small but telling act of composure. He even punched out two hitters in the frame, his final strikeout coming on a 99 mph fastball that hinted at another gear still within reach.
“I was pretty good intensity-wise the first two innings,” Sasaki said through an interpreter. “But in the third inning, I threw a lot of two-seamers and that made my mechanics kind of off.”
That mechanical drift told the story. While experimenting with his two-seamer, Sasaki’s control wasn’t what he wanted it to be. The adjustment didn’t come until the following inning, by which point the damage had already been done.
His final line reflected the unevenness: 3⅓ innings, four hits, three runs, four walks, and five strikeouts on 71 pitches (38 strikes). He exited after allowing a leadoff double in the fifth, his night ending not with a crescendo, but another question mark.
Through the spring, those question marks have added up. Sasaki now carries a 13.50 ERA in Cactus League play — a number that, while glaring, doesn’t seem to concern him.
“There’s a lot of things I need to work on,” he said. “But it’s just spring training. The result in spring training doesn’t really matter.”
That much is true. The Dodgers aren’t evaluating Sasaki on March box scores; they’re evaluating whether his adjustments take hold by April. And within Tuesday’s outing, there were reasons to believe they might. The early-inning efficiency. The ability to recover mid-inning. The swing-and-miss stuff that doesn’t disappear even when his command does.
Still, the broader takeaway remains unchanged.
For every sequence where Sasaki looks like a frontline force, there’s another where his delivery drifts, his command escapes him, and the innings spiral faster than expected. It’s a rollercoaster — one the Dodgers are willing to ride, but one that hasn’t smoothed out yet.
On this night, Sasaki showed progress. He also showed how far he still has to go.