Dodgers News: In a full-circle moment, Sasaki gives back to earthquake-ravaged region
SUZU, JAPAN — Roki Sasaki spent part of his offseason far from Dodger Stadium, but still very much on the mound and very much in his element. On Saturday, the Dodgers right-hander returned to Suzu City in Ishikawa Prefecture to run a special baseball clinic for children affected by the Noto Peninsula Earthquake and the devastating Oku Noto heavy rains.
For the kids, it was a chance to play catch, laugh, and forget about aftershocks and damaged homes for a few hours. For Sasaki, it was something deeper. At nine years old, he survived the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that destroyed his hometown of Rikuzentakata, killed more than 18,000 people across the region, and took his father and grandparents. Baseball helped him through that loss. Now he is using baseball to help another coastal community fighting its way back.
Suzu City sits near the epicenter of the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, a magnitude 7.6 quake that struck on January 1 and produced some of the strongest shaking Japan has seen since 2011. The quake and ensuing tsunami and landslides killed nearly 700 people, injured more than 1,400, and leveled homes and businesses across Ishikawa Prefecture, including in Suzu, Wajima, Noto and Anamizu. Heavy rains later in the year brought new flooding and damage to an area that was already exhausted. Many families are still in temporary housing and still working through the kind of long, slow recovery Dodger fans in Southern California know all too well from wildfires and mudslides.
Sasaki cannot rebuild houses or rewrite the past, but he can show up. Video from the event shows him in Dodger blue, surrounded by kids in mismatched uniforms, running drills, tossing pitches, and taking time with each group.(YouTube) The message he shared was simple: stay strong, keep your dreams alive, and try to find joy in the game. Coming from someone who has lived through his own disaster, those words carried a different weight than a standard clinic pep talk.
This is not a one-off gesture that sits outside the rest of his story. When Sasaki signed with the Dodgers and was introduced before the Tokyo Series against the Cubs, he spoke openly about how surviving 3/11 shaped him, and how that experience motivates him to give back in places that are hurting. His hometown of Rikuzentakata still calls him a “hero” and a “treasure,” in part because he returns every winter to visit, work out, and stay connected with the people who watched him grow up.
Since coming to Los Angeles, Sasaki has leaned into that same sense of responsibility. Through a partnership between the Dodgers and the United States-Japan Foundation, he has been part of a broader effort that supports youth-focused nonprofits in Japan. The organization notes that he has donated more than 10 million yen to Iwate Prefecture to help with wildfire relief, another example of how closely he ties his success on the mound to communities dealing with disaster.
He is not alone in that work. Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers donated $1 million to support victims of Japan’s earthquakes soon after the Noto disaster, part of a pattern of giving that stretches from Japan’s west coast to fire-damaged neighborhoods in Los Angeles.The team’s Japanese trio of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Sasaki have all used clinics and charity events to connect with young players and families who feel the impact of these disasters long after the headlines fade.
On the field, Dodger fans already know what Sasaki can do. He arrived from Chiba Lotte with a perfect game and a reputation for triple-digit fastballs, then picked up his first MLB win in early May against the Braves as part of a stretch that showed flashes of the “Monster of Reiwa” stuff we all heard about. Later in the year he became a weapon out of the bullpen in October, blowing away hitters in the NLDS and drawing praise from veterans like Freddie Freeman for his poise in big spots. Probably his shining moment was in Game 4 of the NLDS when he threw three perfect innings against the Phillies to put the Dodgers in control of the series.
What happened in Suzu this week reminded everyone that the story is bigger than radar-gun readings. The same right-hander who dominated a playoff inning in Los Angeles can also kneel in the dirt next to a kid whose school gym had to be used as a shelter and talk about how baseball helped him through a lonely, frightening time. The same uniform that fills up the Tokyo Dome for the Dodgers opening series can turn up on a windy local field, where the only cameras belong to parents and a few local reporters.
For fans in L.A., it also feels like a loop closing. When Sasaki was introduced as a Dodger back in March, he talked about wanting to stand with Los Angeles as the city dealt with its own catastrophic wildfires, saying he understood what it meant to have your world turned upside down by forces you cannot control. Now, in Suzu City, he is doing for others what people once did for him: showing up, listening, and offering a few hours of hope wrapped in a game of catch.
There will be plenty of time this spring to chart his velocity, track his pitch mix, and argue about his role in the rotation. For one afternoon in Ishikawa, Roki Sasaki was something even more important. He was a Dodger in a battered town, using baseball to tell a group of kids on a shaken peninsula that their dreams still matter.
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