u/soccer1124

uj/ If you need the joke explained: >!Make sure you catch the highlighted segment of the screenshot that is upset about how TFA allegedly 'undoes' the things we see in releases that came out......after TFA.!<

I hesitated on making this. I made a very similar thread about the day after his most recent start vs the Angels. But today I had sometime to kill, and thought I'd try to visualize the data a little bit better via some normalized bell-curves.

I thought the updated visual was worth it, its an off-day anyway, and maybe some people who would be interested might have missed it the first time. I hope this doesn't come across as spam.

Basically, I took 4 games of Sasaki:

1. His great start against the Angels. (Appears in the brighter blue to stand out in each chart)
2. Perhaps his worst start: against the Nationals.
3. His second and third most recent games (Cards & Giants)

I've been hearing a theme that one issue he has is his fastball is "too straight." So using baseball savant, I brought in every instance of his fastball used in those games. The charts look at his velocity, spin rate, Induced Vertical Break, drop, and Horizontal-Break.

Anyway, in the original post, where I just plotted every single pitch on a timeline, it was a little messy to fully see the whole picture, and I think these visuals pronounce things more clearly.

Neither his velo or spin rate were at all notable. But despite neither of those things changing, he gathered more movement on his fastball. You can see a much more noticeable shift in the peak on the other three charts. His IVB is lower, but since that's upward break in that chart, less IVB there means more drop.....I believe, lol.

Or perhaps I just stumbled into the answer while writing this. Yeah, I think this would mean that he didn't need to "add" spin for the movement, rather he just needed to shift the axis that its spinning around.

Others have noted his command in general being better as well, so I'm sure there were multiple factors involved. He also relied less on his fastball compared to those other games. In the end, I'm just curious to see how his fastball looks beyond this, and how helpful this might have been in allowing him to setup his other stuff. I'll probably see how his next few starts go and see how the underlying data compares to his effectiveness.

DISCLAIMER: In general, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I will probably get lots of things wrong. But I was curious, wanted to look at things, saw a potential "pattern" and figured I'd share.

Background: I've been hearing that Sasaki's fastball has been a weakness that it goes "straight." When looking at some metrics, I didn't completely understand what it meant, since the movement profile on it seems to be about the same as league average. Then people talked about his arm angle and the 'visual appearance' of it and....ok, I guess I can get the logic of it. But needless to say, I've been kind of curious to see what's been going on with his fastball.

After having so much success yesterday against the Angels, I wanted to see if anything was different with his fastball in particular. So I compared that game vs his previous two (Giants & Cardinals) as well as perhaps his worst start (Nationals). These are pitch-by-pitch charts of just his fastball in all 4 starts, taken from Baseball Savant

I wanted to highlight his Angels performance, so that's in the brighter blue, with the other games in a lighter color to rest as background.

Interestingly, his spin and velo seems to be pretty consistent across all 4 games.

His Induced Vertical Break, you can see is much lower (for purposes of the fastball, that's described as breaking upwards, as they discount gravity, whatever that means.) And so I believe that naturally means his Drop on it is also more pronounced as you can see on the Drop chart he seemed to be getting more drop consistently.

Likewise, his horizontal break seemed to be consistently highest.

So its interesting that the drop and break were more than ever before despite the spin being mostly the same. Not sure what to make of that, but the fastball was definitely operating differently regardless.

Also of note: He threw 90-91 pitches in all 4 games, except the Cardinals, where he threw 104 pitches. So it also seems worth noting that of the 4 games looked at, he relied on his fastball the least in this one (it was still his most used pitch, I think, but lowest of the most, ha.)

Anyway, do with all this that you want, but just thought I'd throw it out there as something was different yesterday.

EDIT: Go figure, Reddit completely deleted my charts....

https://youtu.be/HkfGtQPJOOA?si=L9ScUiRCgJ6CbJAR&t=273

I'm not exactly a noob, as baseball has probably been in my life before any other sport was, but I sure do feel like one when it comes to this stuff because I swear announcers are just straight up gaslighting me the whole time. (And obviously some are better than others.) So here's the current gripe:

The link is timestamped. Sasaki throws a pitch VERY up & in. The guy talking starts going, "Ok, Walker must be thinking slider down and away or a splitter down and away." On the next pitch, Walker hits a homer and the announcer immediately jumps into talking about what a mistake Sasaki makes. "That was middle-middle!" "The easiest pitch to throw is right down the middle. The easiest pitch to this is right down the middle."

Bro. That pitch was NOT right down the middle, wtf are you on about??? That painted the inside edge. I'm not even convinced that was a mistake by Sasaki. The spin rate on it is low, but the vertical drop on it is about as strong as any other splitter he's thrown. And I'm not even sure Will Smith was setup to be down and away either?

https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/gamefeed?date=5/3/2026&gamePk=823067&chartType=pitch&legendType=pitchName&playerType=pitcher&inning=&count=&pitchHand=&batSide=&descFilter=&ptFilter=FS&resultFilter=&hf=pitchVelocity&sportId=1&liveAb=#823067

I don't know, I just swear these guys are making things up, "No doubt this batter is ready for down and away." <Pitch is thrown inside, low> "Oh, my god, what a mistake! Batter was obviously going to be ready for that!"

This stuff drives me nuts, lol. It always seems like people talk about this like it's such a known thing that in <this> spot you throw <that> pitch. But if everyone knows this and that, doesn't that mean you'd precisely not want to throw <that> <there>?

This is kind of a minor thing, but man, it almost made me miss a game.

This is what the scorebug looks like for me at the top when I first load the site on a laptop. I actually have to scroll to the left to see if there is still a game to be played today. I almost missed out on turning the Boston/Ottawa game because it looked like there wasn't anything until the 5th. The only reason I double checked that is because I see MIN/MTL listed like three times in a row. (Which feels like I'm still missing another BOS/OTT game, lol, but I guess the rest of that is accurate, weird.)

But also... All that unused white space, but no indication of who is leading the series. If you go to the NHL's or NBA's website, its immediately there for you. I don't know, just a bit of a mildly frustrating experience that seems like it could very easily be improved upon. Maybe someone who can do something will see this, lol