Dodgers notes: Will Smith back tightness, Roki Sasaki’s splitter

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A few more looks at Roki Sasaki’s start and win on Saturday. First from Katie Woo at The Athletic, on Sasaki’s pitch repertoire:

He wanted to throw his splitter harder, he told pitching coaches Mark Prior and Connor McGuiness, similar to how he threw the pitch in Japan. After months of inconsistency, Sasaki finally felt his delivery was in a good enough place to make the change. McGuiness made a couple of tweaks — the biggest one being a slight grip adjustment— and the two coaches gave Sasaki the all clear to try the pitch in his bullpen session in San Francisco.

“The first one was disgusting,” Prior said. “So we were like, yeah, let’s do that.” Dylan Hernández at the California Post looked back to Sasaki’s early days in Japan and was left wanting in the current version: “I think that my No. 1 problem hasn’t been my fastball but rather the percentage of forkballs I’ve been able to throw over the plate,” Sasaki said in Japanese.

By reducing the vertical break of the pitch, Sasaki made it easier to control — but also not as lethal. Ayako Oikawa at MLB.com talked to several major leaguers about their various methods for breaking in their gloves.