What is happening? Welcome to the PlusBitch Podcast.

We're a pitching podcast from PitcherList.com.

My name is Nick Pollock.

Today is May 18th.

And yes, we are going to talk about baseball. Are you Roki? Are you Roki adding? That is the question. Roki Sasaki, seven innings, one earned run, four, it's zero walks and eight strikeouts. You got the win yesterday against Angels. Finally, we have a start from Roki Sasaki.

That is good.

Oh my gosh, we've been waiting for so long. And it's clearly because he's so much better at pitching now. He's changed all these things, right? Well, no. His slider feel was as good as we've seen all year. That was really one of the bigger questions we had in spring when he unveiled that he had this new pitch, okay, it's an 86 mile per hour gyro slider.

It's very average, so it requires him to throw it super well, and that's what he did.

He located incredibly well against right-handers and left-handers alike.

Now, the big thing you're probably going to see is Rokey Sasaki throwing both a splitter and a forkball.

Sivant decided, you know what, we are going to split that out into two different pitches.

The thing is they really aren't that different.

The only real distinction I see in movement is that it's a little bit extra horizontal on the splitter versus the forkball. I imagine if I looked at the spin rates, they'd be a little bit different, but I don't really see this as why Sasaki was better.

I kind of think this is the Angels being bad. He did get three inches extra horizontal ride on that four seam, which is kind of interesting, just kind of out of nowhere.

But it's not enough.

It's still a empty velocity 96 mile per hour four seamer and an average gyro slider and then the

splitter slash forkball.

He got a ton of strikes.

I mean, it was 75% strikes in this one, which is a far cry from everything we've

seen thus far of like sub 60% strike rates and all. This is a very nice birthday party in my view

right now. I want to genuinely hope, genuinely hope that this is it, that this is Sasaki,

taking that 14% swing strike rate that we've seen from him this season and actually turning it

...