Dodgers right-hander Roki Sasaki is nearing a return from the injured list, where he’s spent the past few weeks due to a blister issue on his pitching hand. When the 24-year-old makes his return this week, it’ll be as a member of the bullpen, manager Dave Roberts told the team’s beat yesterday (via MLB.com’s Sonja Chen). There’d been some thought to getting him one more start, but Sasaki is going to work in relief during the postseason anyhow, and he’ll get a jumpstart on that role in the coming days. He’s expected back for the team’s next series, against the Padres, which begins tomorrow.
Sasaki has worked exclusively as a starter during the 2026 regular season. He’s taken the mound 23 times and posted a 4.60 ERA over 119 1/3 innings. The run-prevention numbers aren’t great, but Sasaki has made big gains relative to 2025 in terms of strikeout rate (17.4% in ’25, 22.9% in ’26), walk rate (13.7% to 9.4%), swinging-strike rate (8.7% to 13.5%) and opponents’ chase rate (22.3% to 33.3%) in his second season of major league work. Opponents have lost a full mile per hour in terms of average exit velocity (90.6 to 89.6) and seen their hard-hit rate drop by more than two percentage points (45.4% to 43.1%).
Sasaki’s stuff has already ticked up this year; he’s added 1.7 mph to his average four-seamer, which has sat at 97.8 mph this year. A move to short relief in the postseason should further add to that velocity gain. It’s a role shift with which Sasaki is plenty familiar. He worked primarily as a starter in his 2025 rookie season before moving to the ‘pen last October. Though he struggled during the ’25 regular season, Sasaki held opponents to just one run on six hits and five walks through 10 2/3 postseason innings last year.
Teammate and countryman Shohei Ohtani, meanwhile, is nearing his own return from the injured list and could be back as soon as Wednesday, according to Roberts (link via Maddie Lee of the Los Angeles Times). Roberts and Ohtani himself said early this month that there was little to no chance of the two-way superstar returning to the mound this season. He’s been hobbled by left knee and right biceps issues of late — the former keeping him off the mound since July and the latter impacting his swing for several weeks before he was finally placed on the 15-day injured list a couple weeks ago.
Ohtani had a nine-game hitting streak (and collected multiple hits in six of 11 games) in a stretch from late July into early August. His bat went ice cold thereafter; in 113 plate appearances from Aug. 7 through Sept. 7, he slashed just .194/.301/.388 with a 30.1% strikeout rate. The Dodgers will look to get him back in the lineup for the final five games of the regular season to get him some critical reps at a time when the minor league season has ended (and Ohtani can thus not simply head to Triple-A for a rehab stint).
Turning to another pair of banged-up Dodgers stars, Doug Padilla of the Orange County Register writes that center fielder Andy Pages is expected to be reinstated from the injured list ahead of tomorrow’s series opener against the Padres. That meshes with reports from last week that Pages could return and log a few games before the playoffs begin. Lefty Blake Snell, however, is on a murkier timeline.
Snell hasn’t been placed on the injured list, but he departed his most recent start (last Thursday) after only an inning of work due to groin discomfort. He’s not going to pitch in the Padres series, Padilla notes, but Snell hasn’t been ruled out for the final series of the season. The Dodgers will travel to San Francisco to take on one of Snell’s former clubs, the Giants, for a three-game series that commences Friday.
If Snell is able to start during that series without issue, he’d have plenty of time to rest for the postseason. The Dodgers have secured a bye through the Wild Card round of play, so Snell wouldn’t need to get back on a mound until Oct. 3 at the earliest — the scheduled date for Game 1 of the National League Division Series.
Injuries limited Snell to only eight starts and 38 2/3 innings so far in 2026. He’s been dominant when healthy, evidenced by a 1.86 ERA and 33.1% strikeout rate in that time. If he avoids any sort of injury that would threaten his October availability, he’d join Tarik Skubal, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow in a powerhouse rotation as the Dodgers try to secure MLB’s first threepeat since the 1998-2000 Yankees.
Hence then, the article about dodgers notes sasaki ohtani pages snell was published today ( ) and is available on MLBtraderumors ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Dodgers Notes: Sasaki, Ohtani, Pages, Snell )
Also on site :
- Sean Hogan’s ‘The Dark Gets In’ Boarded for Worldwide Sales by Blue Finch Films Ahead of Beyond Fest Bow (EXCLUSIVE)
- R.E.M. Reissues Its Second Album 42 Years Later — And the Limited-Quantity Pressing Could Sell Out Fast
- Inter Miami vs San Diego: When and Where to Watch Messi in MLS 2026