What is happening? Welcome to the Plus Pitch Podcast. More on Pitching Podcast from Pitcherlist.com. My name is

Nick Pollack. Today is March 30th, and yes, we are going to talk about baseball. Oh, boy, Roki Sasaki

is the lead today for the SB Roundup. Rocky Sasaki. And this is what he did, all right? He threw four seamers

at 96, not like 98, and he had the splitter that had a sub-30% strike rate.

So what was the result?

1.2 innings, 200 runs, 3, it's 4 walks and just two strikeouts for Sasaki.

Very disappointing, especially for people who got him in drafts, where they kind of thought

they were going to get like a stud for the entire season.

And here's the problem with sasaki he doesn't have a bridge pitch he tries to throw this slider it's not very good it's very

mediocre lots of waist pitches with it and you think about every other japanese pitcher that came

over with a splitter and a four seamer you have those bridge pitches you have tanaka with his

slider you even have kentamaeda with his slider as well.

With like the split change in the fastball, you have, you Darvish with 20 million pitches, but you have Kodaisinga with the cutter, Dicekate with a lot of pitches as well.

You have Yamamoto on the same team with his curveball and even an added cutter.

And the thing with Sasaki is that the four seamer itself doesn't get whiffs.

It is not well located. It doesn't

have a lot of vert. It doesn't have the best angle. It's really just this seven feet of extension.

But the thing is, at 96 and 7 feet of extension, what Sasaki should be doing is trying to go

upstairs with it and then try to throw a cutter or a maybe a hard slider, a power slider underneath it.

It doesn't look like a guy who's good with a spin, unfortunately, which means that maybe a sinker

at 94 or something along those lines just to get a different look inside the zone and take advantage

again of that extension to get separation.

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