Roki Sasaki’s Splitter: A Game-Changer in Baseball!

So, over ten years ago, a pitcher named R.A. Dickey wowed everyone with a knuckleball that was super unusual. Now, Roki Sasaki is potentially kicking it up a notch.

While Dickey’s knuckleball usually hung around in the 60s or 70s mph, he managed to toss his around 80 mph — and he threw it for strikes! When this “angry knuckler” was on point, it messed with batters so much that he snagged the 2012 Cy Young Award, making him the only knuckleballer ever to achieve that.

Now, we’re not saying Sasaki is throwing a knuckleball, but it’s kind of similar. His splitter is like a knuckleball in that it can break in different ways every time he throws it. And he does this with less spin than any other non-knuckleball pitch in the game!

Let’s chat about Sasaki’s splitter, which is already being hailed as one of the best pitches around this spring training.

When Sasaki took the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers for his second outing in Arizona, he pretty much mirrored his first game by tossing four scoreless innings with just 41 pitches, striking out two and allowing one hit against the Cleveland Guardians.

In his first game, Sasaki tossed his splitter 18 times, got eight swings, and made batters miss seven times! In his next outing, he threw it 11 times, with four swings and three whiffs. That’s ten missed swings out of just twelve! That’s an insane whiff rate of 83.3%. Sure, it might go down when the real games start, but it’s clear nobody knows what to do with this pitch yet — not even the fancy cameras!

Roki Sasaki’s splitter is out of this world

Over both of Sasaki’s outings, the high-tech MLB’s Statcast system struggled to tell the difference between his splitter and his slider. It’s supposed to be easy to spot a splitter thanks to its super low spin rate, but Sasaki’s pitch is so unique that it messes with the numbers. The system even mixed it up with sliders and curveballs at times!

Check this out: Sasaki threw back-to-back splitters at Tyler Freeman. The first broke eight inches glove-side for a swinging strike — which usually screams slider — and the second barely broke at all, just one inch for a called strike. That’s not typical! It’s wild to think that just one batter earlier, he had thrown a splitter that broke eight inches arm-side!

That’s not normal! Generally, only knuckleballs can pull off such wild directional shifts. Sasaki has managed to combine that chaos into a mid-80s pitch that’s easy to control. It’s practically a unicorn pitch!

Roki Sasaki might just be limitless

One big concern about Sasaki as a prospect right before he signed with the Dodgers was that some people viewed him as a two-pitch pitcher — just a fastball and a splitter. He made some headway on his slider last year, but that kind of setup can be tough in the big leagues.

But guess what? Sasaki isn’t just a regular pitcher! He’s been announced to make his MLB debut when he starts Game 2 of the Tokyo Series next week. Instead of seeing him as needing more pitches, think of him as a knuckleballer who can also throw a blazing fastball. His pitches have so many possible paths that hitters are caught waiting. Plus, he could be the hardest-throwing pitcher around. It’s like if Dickey had Craig Kimbrel’s fastball!

Roki Sasaki’s splitter is even more deadly than we imagined.

That’s why everyone was after Sasaki this offseason, and he could’ve raked in over $200 million if he had been able to freely sign, like his teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto did last season.

If there’s a downside after Tuesday’s outing, it’s that Sasaki averaged only 96.3 mph with his fastball, which is about two mph less than last week. There could be a lot of reasons for this — good or bad — but it was just one game, and he still looked pretty solid out there.