One month ago Tuesday, Roki Sasaki was in Tacoma, Wash., warming for his second career Triple-A relief outing. He entered in the sixth inning, getting two grounders and a strikeout as he retired a prospect and a pair of hitters who’d combined to hit .234/.268/.308 in the Majors this year and haven’t been anywhere near Seattle’s playoff push.
Two weeks before that outing in Tacoma, manager Dave Roberts had made it clear that the early returns on Sasaki’s rehab weren’t exactly lighting up the scouting reports.
“The performance, the stuff hasn’t been there,” said Roberts after Sasaki struck out only two Sugar Land Space Cowboys in five innings on Sept. 2. “I think there needs to be a tick up in stuff. And also against Triple-A hitters, you would expect more.”
Obviously, a series of mechanical changes, a role shift to relief, and the dire need in the Dodgers’ bullpen changed things quickly. So, the team has done exactly what you’d expect they’d do with a 23-year-old rookie with exactly zero track record of Major or Minor League success: They’ve eased him back into things by inserting him into some of the most pressure-packed situations any regular playoff reliever has had to face in the last 25 years.
No pressure, kid. Go get ‘em. You’re the closer in the World Series now. No Space Cowboys or Isotopes here — just Cal Raleigh or Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
There is, as always, a way to quantify “pressure-packed,” and in this case, it’s called Leverage Index, which evaluates the importance of each situation based on the score, inning, outs and runners on base, making the point clear that pitching with the bases loaded in a tie game has a lot more riding on it than a bases-empty, two-out situation in a blowout.
Going back to 2000, more than 200 different pitchers have had a postseason where they’ve thrown at least eight innings, as Sasaki has. If you rank them all by Leverage Index, Sasaki’s situations rank fifth from the top, entering games that were, on average, 2.1 times as critical as an ‘average’ situation.
The names and years, if you’re familiar with 21st century baseball history, tell some stories by themselves.
Highest postseason Leverage Index, 21st century (1.00 is ‘average’)
(To really drive home how this works: The pitcher in that time who comes in dead last on the list, the one who had the least critical situations, was Brent Honeywell, who soaked up 8 2/3 innings of mop-up work last October, entirely in Dodgers losses. His opportunities were 90% less pressure-filled than even average spots. Talk about the data matching the eye test.)
Sasaki was, until recently, at the very top of the list, tied with Jenks. That was before a relatively low-pressure outing in NLCS Game 4 — not that the ninth inning to close out a series is easy, but he entered a clean inning with the Dodgers up by four runs.
Again, as a reminder: Barely more than a month ago, he was facing Wade Meckler, Hunter Bishop, Osleivis Basabe and the rest of the Sacramento River Cats, impressing almost no one along the way. He’s now been put in the biggest spots of the biggest games against the biggest hitters.
When he entered in Game 2 of the NLDS as the third reliever of the ninth inning, as Blake Treinen and Alex Vesia had turned a 4-1 lead into a first-and-third with two outs and a one-run lead cliffhanger, it was one of the 10 highest leverage postseason spots in baseball history – more than seven times more critical than your average situation. (It is also fair to note that one of the few games ever that were of higher pressure was when Treinen had to enter in the first game of the NLCS, when Sasaki retired just two of the five Brewers he faced.)
The late Jenks is something of a parallel, in that he was, like Sasaki, a rookie who didn’t work his way into the ninth inning until late in September. Also like Sasaki, he followed one of the strongest postseason starting rotations in recent history, to the point that he didn’t appear even one time in the ALCS as the White Sox rotation threw four consecutive complete games, giving him a full 15 days off before the World Series began.
Sasaki won’t quite have that kind of rest, though it will be a full week between the end of the NLCS and the start of the World Series.
That’s a slightly different tone than the one Roberts struck just a few weeks earlier, wondering if Sasaki would be able to up his game against even Triple-A hitters. He’s not just on the roster. He’s not just filling in some innings to get through the night. He’s the primary closer being placed in some of the biggest spots we’ve seen any reliever have to handle in a long time. It’s about a million miles from Tacoma, to put it kindly.
