PHILADELPHIA — Halfway across the world, Roki Sasaki had a secret admirer. In 2021, his first season in Nippon Professional Baseball, the Chiba Lotte Marines' teenaged phenom regularly blew triple-digit fastballs by hitters and complemented them with a split-fingered fastball that behaved like a high-velocity knuckleball. Once a week, new videos of Sasaki's latest start would find their way onto social media, and when they did, Rob Hill would consume them with equal parts appreciation and awe.
«I keep a mental tab of a lot of pitchers that I like,» said Hill, the Dodgers' 30-year-old director of pitching, «and I'll go back and look how they're doing and see how their bodies are moving and playing, like almost a game of: If they were with me, what would I do?»
On Sept. 4 this year, Hill got the opportunity to answer that question. Over the previous four months, Sasaki's ballyhooed rookie season with the Dodgers had devolved into a disaster. He struggled through eight starts, hit the injured list with a right shoulder impingement May 13, started throwing again two weeks later and was shut down once more June 16. He returned to the mound for Oklahoma City two months after that with a fastball sitting at just 93 mph in Triple-A and had lost hope of contributing substantively to the Dodgers' attempt to be the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back World Series.
Then came the early-September debrief with Hill at the Dodgers' complex in Arizona. For months, officials throughout the organization had worked to gain Sasaki's trust, cognizant of how loath he was to offer it. President of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, general manager Brandon Gomes and manager Dave Roberts all had let Sasaki know they hadn't lost
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