Last night in Tokyo, Japan, the Los Angeles Dodgers started their 2025 season the way the 2024 season ended — with a victory. The 4-1 result over the Chicago Cubs in the opener of the Tokyo Series surprised absolutely nobody, but the local crowd was treated to a show. Both starters — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — played well, and Shohei Ohtani recorded two hits and scored two runs.
The two teams will face off again tonight in the back half of the series. The first pitch, once again, will take place at 7 p.m. Japan time (6 a.m. ET). For Los Angeles, new signing Roki Sasaki will be on the mound, while Chicago will start Justin Steele.
The Dodgers are 1.5-run favorites at DraftKings Sportsbook (-155 on the Moneyline) and the run total is set for 8. Meanwhile, the Cubs are +130 on the Moneyline.
Roki Sasaki U13.5 Outs Recorded (-120)
In the long run, expectations for Sasaki are high; in four seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), Japan’s top league, Sasaki had a 29-15 record and a 2.10 ERA, throwing 394.2 innings, striking out 505, and being named an All-Star twice. Japan has produced a lot of tremendous pitchers — Yamamoto, Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Hideo Nomo, and Masahiro Tanaka come quickly to mind — but Sasaki is arguably the best. The 23-year-old survived the devastating tsunami that hit his hometown of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture on Japan’s northeastern coast in March 2011, threw the fastest pitch by a Japanese high schooler ever, and tossed a perfect game in NPB, one of just 16 in that league’s history. No Japanese pitcher has ever won a Cy Young Award, but either Sasaki or Ohtani, a fellow Iwate native, could easily become the first.
That journey to become one of the greats doesn’t necessarily have to begin tomorrow, though. Yamamoto shattered the record for the most-expensive player to come directly from the NPB when he inked a 12-year, $325 million contract with Los Angeles prior to the 2024 season, but he had a horrific debut, lasting just one inning and giving up four hits and five runs in a 15-11 loss to the San Diego Padres at the Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, South Korea. He went on to have an excellent rookie season and played a critical role in the team’s first championship in an 162-game season since 1988. Sasaki threw just seven innings across two appearances in spring training and was pretty good, but the Dodgers will be careful with their new star, especially since he’s coming from a thinner NPB rotation. I’m expecting a short outing, regardless of his effectiveness, and I won’t be concerned either way.
Teoscar Hernandez O1.5 Total Bases (+105)
The 32-year-old Dominican had a resurgent season in 2024 with Los Angeles and played a critical role in its championship run, being named an All-Star for the second time in his career and hitting a career-high 33 home runs, and he was rewarded with a three-year, $66 million contract to stay with the Dodgers. Hernández mashed particularly against left-handed pitchers like Steele, slashing .290/.357/.574 and accumulating 89 total bases in just 171 plate appearances, significantly better efficiency than he did against righties. He won’t be facing southpaws all game, given that every member of Chicago’s bullpen is right-handed, but it’s not like he was horrible against righties either. Hernández recorded two or more total bases in 68 of his 154 appearances in 2024, although he only went one-for-four with a single and a walk last night.
Steele was pretty solid in 2024, going 5-5 with a 3.07 ERA, even if he didn’t quite reach the heights that he did the previous season, when he finished fifth in NL Cy Young Award voting. In fact, opponents’ average exit velocity of 85.4 miles per hour would have been the second-lowest mark in the league if Steele had pitched enough innings to qualify, and his 33.2% hard hit percentage also would’ve been among the best figures in baseball. However, he was aided by solid defense — his Fielder-Independent Pitching (FIP) figure was 0.16 points higher than his ERA and he allowed just a .273 batting average on balls in play, one of the league’s lowest figures — and his ground ball to fly ball ratio was the lowest of his career. Line drives and fly balls are typically more likely than ground balls to produce extra-base hits.
Ian Happ O0.5 Walks (+110)
If there’s been any knock on Sasaki’s performance in spring training — he’s yet to concede a run and has given up only three hits in seven innings — it’s that his control has been up-and-down. Sasaki repeatedly touched 100 miles per hour on the mound in the NPB, and very few guys who have thrown that hard have paired it with elite control. In the NPB, Sasaki did, recording 5.74 strikeouts per walk for his career, a figure that would have been the sixth-best among all qualified MLB pitchers in 2024. But he did slipped slightly in his age-22 season to a more pedestrian 4.03 strikeouts per walk figure that would’ve still been 17th in the MLB. And while statistics in the NPB — usually considered the world’s second-best league — are often predictive of MLB success, it’s not wholly shocking that Sasaki walked three batters in the preseason.
The 23-year-old is clearly mentally tough, having dealt with the trauma of losing his father in the 2011 tsunami, the pressure that comes with being anointed Japan’s next top prospect at a young age, and pitching in front of huge crowds in the NPB for years. But inevitably, there will be some nerves that come with making his MLB debut in front of his home country’s fans, facing batters that, by and large, would’ve all been All-Star quality on NPB rosters. Although the Cubs as a team didn’t draw too many walks in 2024, Happ did, finishing fifth in that category and recording an OBP 9.8 percentage points higher than his batting average, the eighth-largest discrepancy in the league among qualified players. Happ could easily record a leadoff walk against an angsty Sasaki, just as he did last night against Yamamoto.
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