Roki Sasaki hasn’t pitched for over a week now, but the flood of stories about his feats, about the controversy around the scientific approach being taken toward his development, and even about his little confrontation with an umpire has not subsided.

We owe a debt of gratitude to an article by Akira Hirao posted on the AU web portal. Hirao went to some length to document the efforts taken by Sasaki’s high school manager Yohei Kokubo and the Lotte Marines, and also dug up some of the comments after Sasaki was benched in Iwate’s 2019 Prefectural final.

I joked to my podcast partner John E. Gibson that Sasaki’s perfect game would no doubt have some of Kokubo’s 2019 critics saying “I told you so” because Sasaki was so good in his April 10 perfect game that his arm must have been impervious to harm as an 18-year-old.