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It’s Jackie Robinson Day. Plus: Andy McCullough answers your questions about Roki Sasaki, I answer my own question about injuries and here’s your reminder to file your taxes today. (If you’re an MLB player, I suggest starting weeks ago.) I’m Levi Weaver — welcome to The Windup!

Contrast: Jackie Robinson Day 2026

There’s no singularly correct way to honor Jackie Robinson Day, I think. Some feelings are celebratory. Others are heavy. An honest accounting of history surely requires both.

Robinson took a huge step in a movement toward equality. Maybe his 1947 MLB debut wasn’t the reason that Brown vs. Board of Education (1951) or the Civil Rights Act (1964) came to be, but he certainly helped shift public opinion. That’s worth celebrating.

There is also the knowledge of why those things were necessary, why they’re still necessary. Ignore that, and the celebration can become hollow and commodified. Opponents of equality become cartoon movie villains, so one-dimensional that we can’t imagine knowing anyone like that.

  • Celebration: A statue of Robinson stands at Dodger Stadium, erected in 2017. It’s really cool. The full name of the statue is “Stealing Home: The Point of No Return.”
  • Heaviness: Today, Sam Blum has an in-depth story about the statue the Texas Rangers are displaying at Globe Life Field. Its model was a law enforcement officer who was once dispatched to ensure that a nearby high school would remain segregated. That was in 1957, a year after Robinson retired.

I can’t ignore that, especially today. But I’ll use it to measure the distance we’ve come and how far we still have to go. And then I will allow the celebration to remind me which direction to keep moving: forward.

Thank you, Jackie.

📝 McCullough’s Mailbag: What’s up with Sasaki?

Welcome back to our weekly check-in with Andy McCullough’s mailbag. This answer has been edited a bit for length, but you can read everything here.

What do you think the biggest issue with Roki Sasaki has been? And how would you go about fixing him so that he can go back to being the Monster of the Reiwa Era? — Tae K.

I’ll answer the second part of the question first: If I knew how to fix Sasaki, I probably wouldn’t still be working in journalism. Because the problem that ails him is one that has vexed baseball people since time immemorial: He does not throw enough strikes. I know this seems like an overly simplistic answer, but it is true. Sasaki has walked 10 of the 63 batters he has faced this season, a rate of 6.9 per nine innings that is simply unsustainable. He failed to get past the fourth inning in two of those outings. Almost all of his at-bats are lengthy affairs. He doesn’t throw enough first-pitch strikes and he doesn’t put batters away quickly.

His outing against Texas on Sunday demonstrated the limitations of his current ability. Sasaki allowed a pair of hits and issued a pair of walks in the first two frames but emerged unscathed. He was less fortunate in the third. The Rangers laid off his splitter and dared him to throw effective strikes with his fastball. Sasaki could not. He gave up two runs in an inning that could have been a lot worse, and left after the fourth.

I think it is worth noting that although Sasaki is only 24, he has not pitched like the Monster of Reiwa Era for quite a while. Back in 2023, a scout with plenty of experience in the Japanese market told me Sasaki had “the best fastball you will ever see in your life.” Sasaki could touch 102 mph with plenty of movement. But his path to the majors was not a straight line. In 2024, Sasaki’s final season with the Chiba Lotte Marines, I spoke to multiple MLB executives who wondered if he would end up as a reliever.

And if you think about him that way, as a 24-year-old pitching prospect rather than a former phenom, what he’s going through is fairly common. He injured his shoulder last season and his fastball velocity dipped to 96 mph. The heater is sitting at 97 mph, which is plenty of speed, if you can command it. Sasaki, as we have seen, cannot command it. He has recently incorporated a slider, but he is primarily a two-pitch guy. He pairs his fastball with a splitter. The splitter can be nasty. But if you can identify it out of his hand, or if he is tipping it, good teams will lay off and force Sasaki to beat them in the zone with fastballs. He hasn’t been able to do that at an efficient rate, and he hasn’t been able to do that since he came to America.

The lone bit of success Sasaki has experienced as a Dodger occurred last October, when the team used him as a reliever. When we conducted our Aces Project this past spring, Sasaki did not crack the top 50, but we did receive a bevy of intriguing responses. “Nothing about him wows me,” one executive said. Another evaluator described him as “far from polished.” Several of our panelists suggested the bullpen might be in his future.

Numbers: Who’s the most injured team?

It seems like every day this season, we’ve had a new story about an injured member of the Astros or Blue Jays. Today, we got bad news about Christian Yelich and Jackson Chourio in Milwaukee, and there’s a reason the Padres and Cubs are rumored to be interested in Lucas Giolito.

It made me wonder: Which team has had the worst injury luck this year? So I went through all 30 rosters, and here are your answers:

Five most injured teams:
1. Baltimore Orioles (13 players)
T2. Houston Astros (12)
T2. Los Angeles Dodgers (12)
4. Arizona Diamondbacks (11)
T5. Three teams (Blue Jays, Padres, Cubs, 10)

I knew the O’s were banged up, but just didn’t realize it was that bad.

Of course, all injuries are not the same. For instance, the DBacks have the most players on the 60-day IL (seven), with the Orioles coming in second at six, and the Dodgers, Braves, Tigers and Giants tied with five players each.

Also, I was curious who was healthiest, so here’s that list:

Five healthiest teams:
T-1. Guardians (two players, none on 60-day IL)
T-1. Pirates (two, one on 60-day)
T-1. Athletics (two, same as Pirates)
4. Phillies (three, none on 60-day)
5. Cardinals (three, one on 60-day)

Ugh: It’s also Tax Day 2026

Happy “Lobbying Still Works” day to all who celebrate.

But hey: It could be worse? See, while you or I might be able to hop online for a few hours and be done with it, professional athletes have to account for money they make in each city and state they play in.

As Stephen Nesbitt explains, it leads to a byzantine labyrinth of tax forms. Not that players would be doing their own taxes from a visiting clubhouse or hotel room anyway, but this level of complexity ensures that they definitely don’t do that.

Taxes also explain why so many big-leaguers live in Texas, Tennessee and Florida during the offseason. It’s not just the warm weather; those are three of the nine states with no state income tax. (The other six are in markedly colder climates: Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire and Alaska.)

And while we’re at it, Arizona — another baseball hub — is one of two states (North Dakota is the other) with the second-lowest rate, at 2.5 percent.

Handshakes and High Fives

Last night, Kenley Jansen recorded his 479th save. That puts him third all-time, and he has a lot of perspective on what has kept him around this long.

A quick correction: In yesterday’s Windup, I accidentally said that O’s manager Craig Albernaz was hit in the face with a foul ball at the Diamondbacks-Yankees game. Clearly, that was meant to be DBacks-Orioles. An update on Albernaz: he has seven fractures in his cheek and a broken jaw. He is expected to miss … uhhh, zero games; he was back on the top step last night.

Nationals shortstop C.J. Abrams looks great to start the season … again. Is this the year he keeps it up in the second half?

Unless you’ve already seen this already, I guarantee you could take 200 tries and still never guess what former Phillies, Astros and Nationals closer Brad Lidge is doing as a post-baseball career.

In Houston, Tatsuya Imai acknowledges that he’s having a difficult time adjusting to life in the U.S. — including when players eat dinner.

Matt Gelb’s story about Vince Velasquez, who is still in the minor leagues with the Cubs at 33, is so good.

If it seems like Ben Rice is in a platoon situation, Yankees manager Aaron Boone has two words for you …

… which are not the same two words implied by Jarren Duran’s gesture to a fan last night. If Duran’s explanation is true, the fan deserved worse.

On the pods: Over on Slate, after 17 years, Hang Up and Listen signs off with some predictions about what’s coming in sports in the next 17 years.

Most-clicked in our last newsletter: Dave Winfield’s list of the three best leaders he met in the game of baseball.

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