DENVER –– His nameplate was above his locker. His No. 11 jersey hung in his stall.
But in the two days leading up to his Wednesday night start at Coors Field, Dodgers pitcher Roki Sasaki was nowhere to be seen around the team this week.
The reason: The right-hander hadn’t traveled with the Dodgers for the start of this road series against the Colorado Rockies.
Instead, Sasaki hung back in Los Angeles the last couple days for strategic reasons, staying out of the mile-high Denver altitude as long as possible before arriving on Tuesday night for his start in Wednesday’s series-finale.
“We just delayed his [travel] coming here to Denver,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Just so it’s one less night here.”
Sasaki was not the only Dodgers pitcher to follow a non-traditional travel plan this week, amid the team’s brief one-stop road trip to Colorado.
Neither Yoshinobu Yamamoto nor Tarik Skubal made the trek at all, staying in California to prepare for their respective starts on Friday and Saturday this coming weekend –– and avoid any altitude-related adjustments they would have had to make after going to Denver.
Monday night’s starter, Blake Snell, also returned to L.A. the morning after his six-inning, one-run outing, limiting his exposure to the mile-high elements as much as possible ahead of his next scheduled outing back home on Sunday.
As Roberts noted, it was all part of an effort to reduce the burden on their pitchers’ bodies as much as possible.
Handling the physical toll Colorado’s altitude can take has been a long-running challenge for the Dodgers and other MLB teams that regularly visit Coors Field. The low-oxygen environment leads to quicker fatigue and longer recovery times. Pitchers, in particular, can become worn down from multiple days spent in such conditions.
And even for position players, the exhaustion tends to quickly mount.
On Tuesday night, for example, Dodgers catcher Hunter Feduccia got sick after catching back-to-back games at Coors Field (though that might have had something to do with some food poisoning too).
Roberts joked he doesn’t dive into the sports-science-related data on such altitude problems, but noted the team has plenty “of people that do.”
Which is why, this week, the club did its best to keep its starting pitchers away from that atmosphere as much as possible.
