In the morning, I was watching Rōki Sasaki’s start on MLB.com.
The cause of his mechanical breakdown is clear.
Last night, NHK aired a special program about him.
As he himself said, it was because he had begun throwing the slider.
He probably earnestly put into practice what he had heard and learned from Yu Darvish during the previous WBC.
But that was the mistake.
A power pitcher must not make the slider the core of his pitching.
That has long been accepted as common sense in baseball.
The reason is simple.
It causes the sharpness of the fastball to decline, and the velocity to dull as well.
To begin with, relying on the slider is a method chosen by pitchers who are past their prime and are trying to survive.
In that sense, Darvish is an extremely unusual pitcher.
He possesses the rare talent to love breaking balls and manipulate them at will.
But that is not where Rōki Sasaki’s essence lies.
His true greatness lies in a blazing fastball that no one can imitate.
The moment he moved away from that, he began to damage his greatest weapon.
What must not be overlooked as one of Darvish’s characteristics is that, for a pitcher, his arms are extremely short.
Precisely because of that, he is able to control breaking balls with complete freedom.
Rather than being a pure power pitcher, he is a rare and singular figure in baseball who loves breaking balls and dominates hitters with them.
But if one brings a pitching method based on such an exceptional talent into the case of an orthodox power pitcher like Rōki Sasaki, it will instead damage his original strengths.

Last year, when Sasaki could not generate his usual velocity, I watched his pitching form and immediately thought, “Something is off.”
It was especially noticeable from the set position, but compared with the form he had when he was pitching at the highest level in Japan, his hips were sinking in a strangely excessive way.
Like Ohtani, one of Sasaki’s defining traits is the unbelievable flexibility of his shoulder joints and hip joints.
After graduating from high school, he entered camp with the Chiba Lotte Marines.
As I have already written, I was shocked when I saw him playing catch at that time.
When Kiyoshi Nakahata was saying that Sasaki needed to stay in the minors until his body matured, I told him, “What are you talking about? No one can hit the blazing fastball that comes out of that astonishing whip-like arm action.”
He later reversed himself and went to the camp site to see Sasaki.
He said, “I want to see him as soon as possible. Put him in the first team immediately. Those are unbelievable pitches…”
He stands upright, then lifts his leg high into the air like Tarik Skubal.
And then, making full use of his astonishing shoulder and hip flexibility, he unleashes a ferocious fastball exceeding 160 kilometers per hour with a breathtaking whip of the arm.
To begin with, a pitch over 160 kilometers per hour cannot truly be hit in a physical sense.
Professional hitters can only make contact through experience, anticipation, and guesswork.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, aside from Ohtani, there is no one who can hit a home run off a pitch over 160 kilometers per hour.
Only an extremely small number of hitters can turn such a pitch into a home run.
The Japanese record for consecutive strikeouts and the perfect game Sasaki achieved against Orix were unmistakable proof that what I had said was exactly right.
No one could hit him.
And in fact, no one did hit him.
His repertoire consisted of only two pitches: the straight fastball and the forkball.
Kaneda and Egawa built mountains of strikeouts with just two pitches as well: the fastball and the curve.
To be continued.