It's been far from a dream rookie season for 23-year-old fireballer Roki Sasaki, and now, he's just the latest Dodgers starting pitcher dealing with an injury.
Sasaki had his worst start yet on Friday against the Arizona Diamondbacks, giving up five earned runs in four innings and bringing his ERA to 4.72. But the real concern was the fact that he suffered a shoulder impingement, and he has since been placed on the 15-day injured list.
The Dodgers had already lost Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow for the foreseeable future, so even with Clayton Kershaw returning at the end of the week, losing Sasaki was going to take a toll. But it's a burden the Dodgers are willing to bear for as long as it takes to get the rookie right.
As manager Dave Roberts explained after the Dodgers' blowout loss to the Athletics on Tuesday, Sasaki has no timeline for return. The team feels that the shoulder issue has contributed to his slow start, and they're giving him as long as he needs to get back to 100 percent.
“I think that our goal is to get him healthy, get him strong,” Roberts said, per Blake Royer of the Los Angeles Times.
“Make sure his delivery is sound for him to pitch for us. Now with the information we’ve learned, he hasn’t been as productive as he would’ve liked because he was compromised.”
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Roberts also said that although Sasaki didn't let the training staff know he was experiencing discomfort until the Arizona game, he'd been trying to pitch through the pain for weeks.
It speaks to just how much depth the Dodgers have that they can lose two Cy Young caliber pitchers, already be without several others for the year, and still slow-play Sasaki because they have enough depth behind him to keep the train moving.
Now, LA just has to hope the Sasaki they believed they were getting over the winter is the one that emerges at the end of the IL stint.
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