PHOENIX — The Los Angeles Dodgers’ embarrassment of pitching riches presented an awe-inspiring visual on Wednesday. Tucked into a back field of the Dodgers’ spring complex at Camelback Ranch, a contingent of dozens of coaches and front office officials, a future Hall of Fame left-hander and some 60 or so media members sat and took in a bullpen session.
Blake Snell, the two-time Cy Young winner who signed a five-year, $182 million deal this winter and is expected to be the club’s closest version of a workhorse, somehow took a back seat to the man pitching on the mound to his right.
Roki Sasaki, whose decision to come to the United States at age 23 sparked curiosity and whose decision to sign with the Dodgers sparked an outcry, drew an audience. As Sasaki threw, Clayton Kershaw leaned against the chain-link fence and chatted his observations to president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. General manager Brandon Gomes stood off to the left alongside pitching coach Mark Prior as Sasaki went through his delivery, high leg kick and all. Behind him, Will Ireton held up an iPad with the club’s metrics as perhaps the most fascinating pitcher in baseball this season threw his first official bullpen of spring.
A rather tedious affair became an opportunity to witness what the baseball world had keen interest in acquiring this offseason. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts had never seen Sasaki pitch in person before, so he huddled alongside Dodgers personnel to observe. Austin Barnes, one of the few Dodgers who had faced Sasaki before during the World Baseball Classic, squatted behind the plate as Sasaki mixed his two main pitches into a rudimentary procedure on a chilly February morning in Arizona.
Roki Sasaki and Blake Snell throwing side by side. pic.twitter.com/zqFkkxR9iB
— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) February 12, 2025
“Oh my gosh,” Barnes remarked aloud as he moved his glove at the last second to nab a late-diving splitter from Sasaki.
The right-hander has drawn interest from scouts since he was a high schooler touting a triple-digit fastball, though it’s his splitter that might separate him from the rest of the planet.
“The split finger is different,” Barnes said of the pitch that tumbles out of Sasaki’s hand. “I haven’t really seen a pitch like that before. … It’s hard to catch sometimes. It’s moving all over the place.”
The Dodgers, and all of baseball for that matter, coveted Sasaki for what he could be. His fastball velocity dipped last summer in Japan, spawning a homework assignment that made up a significant portion of his free agency this offseason. He’s dealt with significant injury concerns, including shoulder soreness and an oblique injury last year. But in coming over now, he comes cheap — outside of a $6.5 million signing bonus, he will make the league minimum for the Dodgers his rookie season. And at 23 years old, with oodles of talent in a game starving for pitching, the possibilities were endless.
And yet, the time for Los Angeles is now. Friedman said last month the organization will not slow play Sasaki, though they acknowledge there might need to be some time for the right-hander to acclimate to Major League Baseball.
Roberts took that a step further on Wednesday, indicating that Sasaki could very well be in line to pitch alongside Yoshinobu Yamamoto for the Dodgers in their season-opening series in Tokyo.
From one number 11 to another. pic.twitter.com/lZlpEJbUs7
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) February 12, 2025
“I think anything’s on the table,” Roberts said.
The same goes for how good Sasaki will be right away. The Dodgers are quite bullish, not just for the long-term but also for how he slots in for a stacked starting rotation that will be gunning to be baseball’s first repeat champions in a quarter century.
“I don’t think anyone knows the body of work that’s going to come this year,” Roberts said. “But I do feel that when he pitches, he’s going to be very good. He’s very talented. But I’m just as curious as everyone else is. But obviously, pure talent, there’s just not many guys that are as talented as he is.”
The right-hander said much of his first bullpen Wednesday didn’t quite feel right with his mechanics. While scouts have contemplated how much Sasaki will need to develop his slider to become an effective third pitch, Sasaki said much of his focus this spring has centered on getting his fastball shape and velocity back into place and his splitter into a good place.
“Having this opportunity to open the season in Japan with a major league team is really special,” Sasaki said through an interpreter. “I just want to make sure that I’m prepared to be ready for that.”
This is still, of course, all new for him. On the day pitchers and catchers reported for Sasaki’s first spring as a big leaguer, he sat at his locker alongside Yamamoto and reigning MVP Shohei Ohtani. The two Japanese superstars were part of the Dodgers’ pitch to land Sasaki, and now his WBC teammates were teaching him the ins and the outs of his new home.
“Obviously there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t know, so being able to talk to them beforehand just to check how things would go, and then to be able to check with them as things go along was really helpful.”
Among the rituals Sasaki has already learned: in exchange for the No. 11 jersey, the right-hander gifted veteran infielder Miguel Rojas a pair of bottles of Dassai sake.
Phillips, Kopech behind schedule
Evan Phillips’ start to the season might be in jeopardy, but he and the Dodgers have seemingly avoided something much worse. The reliever, who has been amongst the most effective firemen in the sport the last three seasons, revealed this week that the issue that kept him off the Dodgers’ World Series roster last October was a tear on the back of his rotator cuff — one that ultimately required just a platelet-rich plasma injection and not surgery that would have cut much further into the 2025 season.
In his time with the Dodgers, Evan Phillips has posted a 2.28 ERA, becoming one of Dave Roberts’ most trusted arms. (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
Phillips said he felt fatigued after his outing in Game 4 of the NLCS against the New York Mets before the shoulder got worse three days later after pitching out of a bases-loaded jam of the pennant-clinching Game 6. The plan had been for Phillips to go back out for a second inning, but he “just knew that if I went back out something would be really wrong.”
“Not only just be wrong, but I wouldn’t have been able to throw 90 miles an hour out there,” Phillips said. “I would’ve been a shell of myself.”
He and the Dodgers held out hope that he could return for the World Series, but he was left off the roster (rules stipulated that if Phillips aggravated an old injury rather than suffer a new one, the Dodgers potentially couldn’t replace him). Time off and a PRP shot have done him well.
Phillips is in the early stages of a throwing progression, including throwing breaking balls on flat ground. The shoulder, he said, feels as if he’s a month behind where it usually would be at this stage of the year, and Roberts acknowledged that Phillips is behind schedule compared to some of the other relievers in camp. Roberts also said reliever Michael Kopech is “a little bit behind” in his throwing progression, though he stopped short of saying either would definitively start the season on the injured list.
The Dodgers, who re-signed Blake Treinen and added Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates this offseason, certainly have the depth right now to play it slow. They also are expecting to have expanded rosters for their season-opening series in Tokyo.
Kiké Hernández finalizes his return
Kiké Hernández’s return on a $6.5 million deal is official, with a three-week jump on when he inked his reunion with the Dodgers last spring. That, Hernández joked, represented progress.
While returning to the reigning World Series champions always seemed like the most likely landing spot, Hernández said he kept his options open this go-around in free agency, with the Dodgers’ World Series opponent — the New York Yankees — among those to reportedly show interest.
“I feel like there was less interest,” Hernández said. “Maybe teams just assumed that I wanted to come back and come back only.”
The Dodgers held a standing offer to the utility man, with Friedman saying on “Dodgers Territory” this week that the club was only willing to make another addition to its position player group if it was for Hernández.
It took until Monday — the first day that players could be moved to the 60-day injured list to open up a roster spot — for that all to become final.
“I understood that this roster was more full than a Bad Bunny concert,” Hernández said.
(Top photo: Chris Coduto / Getty Images)
