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The Dodgers are actively investigating whether Roki Sasaki is tipping his pitches, per DodgerBlue staff. The concern stems from his second consecutive start against the San Diego Padres, in which San Diego jumped all over him from the first pitch. Sasaki allowed two runs in the first inning and four in the second, surrendering seven hits and two walks in what became a very short outing. The Padres, as the team put it, “were on everything.”

Sasaki’s raw stuff has never been in question. The Japanese right-hander came to the Dodgers with one of the most electric arsenals in professional baseball — a fastball that sits in the upper 90s and a splitter that disappears. He threw a perfect game in NPB at 18 years old. But elite stuff only gets you so far if hitters know what’s coming. Pitch-tipping has derailed stretches for plenty of talented arms over the years, and the fact that the Padres seemed locked in on Sasaki’s offerings from the jump is a red flag the organization isn’t ignoring. Two rough outings against the same team in a row makes the pattern harder to dismiss as coincidence.

This is the kind of thing that can be fixed relatively quickly once it’s identified — a glove position, a grip change visible from the batter’s box, a timing tell in the windup. The Dodgers have one of the best pitching development and analytics infrastructures in baseball, so if there’s something mechanical to find, they’ll find it. That’s the encouraging part. The less encouraging part is that Sasaki has now been tagged hard in consecutive starts, and you’d rather figure this out before the All-Star break than after.

For the bigger picture, we need Sasaki right. This rotation was built around the idea that he’d be a frontline arm alongside Shohei Ohtani, and the margin for error gets thinner when Yoshinobu Yamamoto and others have dealt with their own injury concerns this season. If the pitch-tipping theory holds up, I’d actually feel better about it — that’s a solvable problem. A mechanical flaw or a diminished pitch would be more worrying. For now, the Dodgers are doing the right thing: going to the tape, studying the film, and figuring out what the Padres were seeing. We should know more before his next turn in the rotation.

Source(s): Staff (DodgerBlue) | First reported: July 3, 2026 8:13 PM UTC

God Bless and Go Dodgers