Eventful days have become the norm at Camelback Ranch, but excitement and intrigue was particularly high on Tuesday with Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki and Blake Snell each on the mound in varying fashion.
Ohtani continued exploring a new delivery with pitching out of the windup during his fourth bullpen session of Spring Training.
Shortly after, the Los Angeles Dodgers got their first look at Sasaki in a game setting against an opponent, and Snell made his first Cactus League start of the year.
“I thought Roki was good. Obviously, you just kind of don’t know what to expect, as far as seeing other hitters. But he threw three innings today, velocity looked good,” manager Dave Roberts said.
“I thought there’s a lot of chase with his split, mixed in some breaking balls. I’ll talk to him tomorrow to see how he feels. But I think that talking to our pitching guys, we were pretty pleased with the outing.”
Roberts estimated Sasaki’s fastball velocity was in the mid-90s, which he deemed, “right where we’d expect.”
The Dodgers went into the exercise — a ‘B’ game that functioned more as a simulated game — with the plan for Sasaki to pitch two innings. He instead wound up going three.
“I think he talked to Mark Prior and said he felt good, and Mark felt comfortable for him to go back out there for the third,” Roberts explained.
White Sox prospect hits home run off Roki Sasaki
Social media was already abuzz with Sasaki making his Spring Training debut, and that went into overdrive when he surrendered a leadoff home run to Chicago White Sox prospect Kyle Teel.
MLB Pipeline ranked Sasaki the No. 1 prospect in baseball, while Teel is 32nd on the publication’s top-100 list.
“He’s been a star since he was 16 years old. So certainly, he probably hasn’t got hit a lot, but I do think that some of these guys that I’ve seen that have been really good, elite pitchers, when they get hit in the mouth, they respond back,” Roberts said.
“And so he doesn’t run from competition, and that’s part of his pedigree. So I think it’s more of just building him up, getting him acclimated to Major League hitters, and then let everything else take care of itself.”
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