Sasaki’s Career-Best Outing Masks a Dodgers Pitching Scramble

Roki Sasaki struck out eight Angels across seven innings on Sunday in Anaheim, both career highs, and the Dodgers won 10-1 to finish a series sweep that put 31 Los Angeles runs on the scoreboard. It was the cleanest version yet of the rookie right-hander the team committed to last winter, and easily his most efficient outing. Five pitches got him through the seventh inning, a frame he had never reached before in the majors.

A few hours after the final pitch, the front office traded for left-hander Eric Lauer from Toronto in a cash deal, opened a 40-man roster spot by moving reliever Brusdar Graterol to the 60-day injured list, and put Jack Dreyer on the 15-day IL with shoulder soreness. Three pitching moves in a single news cycle is what a fragile staff looks like when one of its rookies is finally throwing seven innings of one-run ball.

Eight Whiffs, No Walks, Seven Innings of Calm

The sequence that produced Sasaki’s first strikeout told the story of the outing. After Mike Trout doubled off him in the opening frame, the 24-year-old right-hander went straight back into the zone against Nolan Schanuel, mixing two forkballs, a low fastball, and a slider before finishing the at-bat with another forkball on the edge of the plate. Schanuel waved.

Catcher Dalton Rushing, working in his rookie season behind the plate, said the plan was about controlling the count and then showing the chase pitch.

It was one of those things where you kind of just picked one of the three pitches that you wanted to use to get ahead, and then from there, you can kind of play the chase card with him a little bit, and get outside of hitters’ comfort zone.

Efficiency was the part Sasaki had been missing all spring. He had never previously thrown a pitch in the seventh inning of a major league game; on Sunday he needed only five pitches to retire the side. He finished with 18 swing-and-misses, the most by any Dodger starter this year. Manager Dave Roberts said the right-hander was finally executing the things he had been telling the coaching staff he needed to do better, and was now initiating conversations he had let pass earlier in the year.

A Forkball, a Splitter, and a Slider That Bites

Sasaki arrived in Los Angeles with one signature offspeed weapon. He has since split it in two. The original pitch, the one Japanese broadcasters had been clocking for years, is a forkball thrown at roughly 84 mph with a season spin rate near 578 revolutions per minute, which puts it in knuckleball territory.

The newer version, which he debuted in late April, is a firmer splitter at about 90.8 mph with more controlled drop. He uses the splitter as a strike-stealer; the forkball is the chase pitch.

According to Statcast tracking on Sasaki’s player page, his slider, which he and the staff sometimes call a gyro-slider with cutter shape, generated seven whiffs on Sunday, the most of any pitch in the outing. The splitter posted a 50% chase rate. The four-seam fastball reached 98 mph.

The matchup helped. Anaheim entered the day with a 48% swing rate, top third of the league, which gave Sasaki a willing dance partner for his chase pitches. He said through interpreter Kensuke Okubo that he was reading hitters’ reactions and adjusting pitch selection batter to batter.

Roberts framed the season-to-date as a learning curve, noting that some failures had made Sasaki more open to coaching input. The Dodgers took what he called a wait-and-see posture through April; the relationship is better now, the manager said, and Sunday’s outing is what better looks like in box-score form. MLB.com’s breakdown of Sasaki’s two splitter shapes notes the firmer pitch is harder to recognize than the original forkball, which is part of why he has used both shapes in the same at-bat.

The Fourth-Inning Rally That Backed Him Up

The lineup gave Sasaki an early cushion and then a real one. With two outs in the fourth, the Dodgers strung together a five-run rally that ended the game’s competitive phase. Shohei Ohtani and Andy Pages each delivered two-run singles; Kyle Tucker drove in another.

All three hitters had been finding form. Tucker has hit .323 over his last 10 games with five doubles and as many walks as strikeouts since the series opener against his old Houston club, a stretch that has pulled his line back toward what the Dodgers paid for in the winter. Ohtani, speaking through interpreter Will Ireton, said his strike-zone awareness has tightened and the launch angle on his contact is producing the trajectories he wants. He credited his setup posture. Pages has been the quieter contributor of the three; the center fielder has put together run production that has not made the national highlight feed but has shown up consistently in box scores all spring.

Across the three games in Anaheim, the lineup scored 31 runs. Saturday’s 15-2 win included a five-RBI evening from Ohtani. Sunday’s two-out rally was the version of the offense Los Angeles had been waiting on through six uneven weeks of the season, and Rushing said momentum, once this group catches it, gets dangerous quickly.

A Bullpen Drained by Surgery and Soreness

Even with Sasaki throwing seven innings, the relief staff behind him is the thinnest it has been all year. Blake Snell, the two-time Cy Young winner Los Angeles signed in the winter of 2024, is undergoing surgery on his left elbow to remove loose bodies and is out indefinitely. The Dodgers pivoted to a bullpen game in his slot on Friday.

Dreyer joined him on the injured list Sunday with left shoulder discomfort that imaging tied to inflammation. Roberts said the team was being proactive after the reliever felt soreness while warming up Saturday. The loss is sharp: Dreyer carried a 2.08 ERA across a team-high 21.2 innings before the shutdown.

The current pitcher casualty list:

• Blake Snell (LHP, starter): elbow surgery to remove loose bodies, return uncertain, weeks at a minimum.
• Jack Dreyer (LHP, leverage reliever): 15-day IL with left shoulder discomfort, 2.08 ERA across a team-high 21.2 relief innings before the injury.
• Brusdar Graterol (RHP, reliever): moved from the 15-day to the 60-day IL on Sunday, still working back from last year’s right shoulder surgery.
• Tyler Glasnow (RHP, starter): on the IL since earlier in the spring.
• Edwin Diaz (RHP, closer): shelved earlier in May.

To absorb the shortfall, the Dodgers optioned left-hander Charlie Barnes to Triple-A Oklahoma City on Sunday morning and recalled right-handers Paul Gervase and Chayce McDermott, the latter acquired from Baltimore last month. Those moves are calendar management until the bigger arms come back, or until the next trade. The next trade closed before the day was out.

Eric Lauer Returns to the Team That Beat Him

The newest arm arrived the same afternoon. Eric Lauer, the left-hander Toronto designated for assignment a week earlier, came to Los Angeles in a cash-considerations deal that included the Blue Jays reportedly paying down most of the roughly $3.2 million remaining on his $4.4 million arbitration salary.

He is expected to join the team in San Diego this week. The manager said he initially sees the new lefty in a length role out of the bullpen, the same swingman profile he had with Toronto last year.

His 2026 has been the bad version. He has allowed a league-leading 11 home runs across eight outings and carries a 6.69 ERA in 36 1/3 innings, which is what got him cut. The deal is essentially free for the Dodgers, and the upside is the version of the same pitcher Los Angeles itself was unable to score on six months earlier.

That version is the reason this trade is interesting. He worked a 3.18 ERA across the 2025 regular season for Toronto in a swingman role and a 3.12 ERA in the postseason. He threw 4 2/3 scoreless innings against the Dodgers in Game 3 of last October’s World Series, the 18-inning marathon that ended on Freddie Freeman’s walk-off and gave Los Angeles a 2-1 series lead.

The franchise that beat him to a championship is now wagering cash that the swingman version is closer to the surface than the home-run-prone starter Toronto cut last week. The official MLB transaction notice on the deal lists the return as a player to be named later or cash.

Read the other way, the asking price for a left-hander who pitched in the last World Series, and might pitch in the next one, was the cost of clearing him off another team’s 40-man roster.

San Diego on Deck

The sweep pushed the Dodgers back to the top of the National League West, just in time for a three-game series at Petco Park against the Padres. The matchup is the first divisional test since the offense started to look like the offense, and the first since the rotation lost Snell and added a reclamation lefty.

If Sasaki carries the version he showed Sunday into his next start, and if the new arm reverts toward the swingman who held this same lineup scoreless in October, the staff has cover until the bigger names return. If Sasaki’s command slips back to where it was in April and the home runs keep flying out at the pace that ended a tenure in Toronto, San Diego is where the rotation runs out of patches.