For a guy who signed with the Dodgers amid Godzilla-sized hype and then spent a huge chunk of last year rehabbing a shoulder impingement, Roki Sasaki has had a weird, up-and-down 2026. A 5.33 ERA through 16 starts is not what anyone drew up when the posting fee cleared. But nights like July 17 at Yankee Stadium are exactly why the Dodgers never blinked on the bet.
In the team's first game back from the All-Star break, Sasaki sat 100-plus mph over and over, all night, in a building that's seen a few pitchers try to do that before. He didn't just touch triple digits once for a highlight — he lived there.
Rōki Sasaki with back-to-back 102mph Heaters...and ending the at-bat with a disgusting 89mph Slider. 😳
That's the pairing that makes Sasaki so nasty when it's on: a fastball touching 102 with a splitter that just falls off the table underneath it. When both pitches are working in the same start, hitters are guessing wrong in both directions, and Yankee Stadium got a steady diet of it.
Rōki Sasaki, Wicked 92mph Splitter. 🤢
By the numbers, this wasn't just a good start — it was the best single-game velocity display any Dodger has produced since Statcast started tracking pitches. Sasaki threw 21 pitches at 100-plus mph, blowing past Bobby Miller's previous franchise mark of 20. Zoom out on his season and the outing looks even more like a light switch flipping: across his other 26 starts logged in the 100-mph tracker, he'd never cleared 4 pitches at triple digits in a single game. Then he throws 21.
Most 100+ MPH Pitches By A Los Angeles Dodger In Any Single Game In The Entire Pitch Tracking Era: 21 Rōki Sasaki (🔥tonight🔥) 20 Bobby Miller 19 Bobby Miller 18 17 16 Shohei Ohtani 15 Edgardo Henriquez 14 Bobby Miller
The mechanical explanation, per Sasaki himself, is that he reworked how he's using his lower body and felt the difference almost immediately coming out of the break — a tweak, not a rebuild. That tracks with a season that's been more about health than results: after nearly 5 months on the shelf with the shoulder issue, just getting back to full strength was the real story of the first half. The strikeouts (5 in 5.2 innings) and the shutdown of a Yankees lineup (1 unearned run allowed) mattered, but the velocity readout is the number that changes how people talk about him.
It also changes the conversation around him going forward. A guy who was drawing skepticism about whether the arm would ever look like it did in Japan just posted the loudest radar-gun night in Dodgers pitch-tracking history. If this is what Sasaki looks like with his legs finally under him, the back half of the Dodgers' rotation picture — and every prop bet tied to his strikeout totals — just got a lot more interesting.