Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto continues to impress. His best is yet to come

Two years ago, about a week before Yoshinobu Yamamoto made his MLB debut, a number of players and coaches from the Orix Buffaloes offered me scouting reports about their former ace.

One by one, they shared stories and observations about Yamamoto that led each of them to the same conclusion: Yamamoto would triumph in the United States.

There, in an underground parking structure attached to the Buffaloes’ home stadium in Osaka, there was no trace of the skepticism that was permeating the Dodgers at the time.

“He really understands what he wants to do and what his goals are, and he pursues them without wavering,” veteran Buffaloes reliever Yoshihisa Hirano said to me in Japanese at the time.

Days later, however, Yamamoto was destroyed by the Padres. He lasted just one inning and was charged with five runs in the second game of the Dodgers’ season-opening series in South Korea.

His former team’s belief in him didn’t waver.

Now, this season, the now-27-year-old Yamamoto will be the Dodgers’ Opening Day starter. He will scale the mound at Dodger Stadium as a World Series hero, and, by Shohei Ohtani’s estimation, “the No. 1 pitcher in the world.”

Every now and then, Yamamoto’s former teammates will travel stateside to watch him pitch. They never sound surprised by what he does.

Because they always knew.

About his character. About his adaptability.

In fact, conversations about Yamamoto often start with comments about his personality, which seems entirely unaffected by his stature.

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He was a three-time league MVP in Japan, but the Buffaloes’ groundskeeper described him to me as one of the least-demanding pitchers he came across in his two decades with the team.

“Some pitchers are, like, ‘If the mound isn’t like this, I can’t pitch,’” Yosuke Iwata told me on the visit I made to Kyocera Dome two years ago to report on a column I wrote.

Yamamoto wasn’t like that, not when he broke into the Buffaloes’ first team as a teenager and not when he departed as the best pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball.

His interpreter with the Dodgers, Yoshihiro Sonoda, was struck by how grounded he was when they first met at the team’s spring training facility in Arizona. When Yamamoto finished his trademark javelin-throwing routine, Sonoda started to pick up the spears. Yamamoto intervened.

“Please,” Yamamoto told him. “You’re my interpreter. You’re not my servant.”

Some players treat their teammates one way and everyone else another, but Sonoda noticed that Yamamoto didn’t make any such distinctions. Whenever ordering a Starbucks delivery to the team hotel, Yamamoto always buys something for Sonoda.

“He knows who he is as a person,” former Buffaloes pitcher Yu Suzuki said. (Now a television reporter covering the Dodgers, Suzuki is one of my co-hosts on a Japanese-language baseball podcast.)

If being spiritually centered has made Yamamoto unusually considerate of the Dodgers’ rank-and-file employees, it has also made him extremely decisive on baseball matters.

Japanese culture encourages orthodoxy, and that extends to sports. Superiors’ orders are expected to be followed without question. What characterized Yamamoto’s seven seasons in Japan was a conviction to defy authority.

Standing only 5-foot-10, Yamamoto was a fourth-round draft pick. His first year in pro ball was considered a resounding success. He dominated the minor leagues, leading to his call-up to the Buffaloes’ first team, where he made five starts.

“The No. 1 pitcher I faced this year,” said Ohtani, who was in his final year in NPB.

But when Yamamoto reported to spring training in the next year, in 2018, he did so with an entirely new delivery. When I spoke to Buffaloes pitching coach Masafumi Hirai two years ago, he acknowledged he was shocked.

“To be honest, he drastically changed after performing well the year before, so my first thought was, ‘Is this OK?’” Hirai said.

The modifications Yamamoto made were opposed by virtually everyone in the organization. He was a 19-year-old, second-year player in a society where seniority is a major factor defining a person’s place in social hierarchies. Which meant that in this case, he wasn’t in a position to do whatever he wanted.

But Yamamoto stood firm.

Yamamoto was now training with Osamu Yada, a biomechanics expert who was introduced to him by a mutual acquaintance. Yada remains by Yamamoto’s side to this day.

Yada’s workouts, which emphasized flexibility and body control, addressed Yamamoto’s concerns about his recovery time after starts. The now-famous javelin program was designed to help him develop an efficient throwing motion that would reduce stress on his elbow.

Time proved Yamamoto right.

“He delivered results that were good enough to make us shut up,” said Hirai, the Buffaloes’ pitching coach.

Yet the team would be in for another shock.

Following a 2022 season in which he won his second league MVP award, Yamamoto modified his delivery again, replacing his leg lift with a slide step toward home plate.

“A pitcher that good, you’d think he wouldn’t want to change,” Hirai said. “It’d be a different conversation if he was struggling.

“He’s doing it because he’s in search of something better.”

This is what the Buffaloes knew about Yamamoto. This is why they knew he would come to dominate the major leagues, regardless of how his debut went.

Suzuki, his teammate-turned-reporter, recalled speaking to Yamamoto after the Dodgers returned to Los Angeles from the Seoul Series in 2024.

“He wasn’t shaken,” Suzuki said.

Rather than being consumed by doubts of whether he could pitch in the major leagues, Suzuki said, Yamamoto was calmly analyzing the mistakes he made against the Padres.

He was the same person Suzuki knew in Japan.

Which isn’t to say Yamamoto didn’t experience any emotional turmoil in his first season with the Dodgers.

“I’m by no means strong mentally,” he said. “When I get hit, there are times I get really down. But as time passes, things clear up. What I do becomes clear.”

And this here could be the key to everything: He can identify a problem and figure out how to remedy it.

The 2024 National League Division Series against the Padres was a prime example.

Yamamoto was torched in the opening game of the series, giving up five runs in only three innings. Between starts, he changed how he positioned his glove, which the Dodgers speculated revealed to the Padres what kind of pitch he was about to deliver.

In a winner-take-all fifth game of the series, Yamamoto pitched five scoreless innings in a 2-0 victory. The Dodgers went on to win the World Series.

“I think that was the game for which I was the most nervous in my entire baseball career,” said Yamamoto, who described the start as an inflection point.

He now knew he could thrive on the grandest stages against the best of opponents. The key was to stay on the field.

After being sidelined for three months of the 2024 season with shoulder problems, Yamamoto was the only Dodgers pitcher last year to not miss a start. The more he pitched, the more he learned how hitters reacted to his pitches. By the end of the regular season, he was calling his own pitches. By the end of the postseason, he was a World Series legend.

He’s now eyeing a Cy Young Award, a prize no Japanese pitcher has won. He returned from the offseason with a more muscular frame, which could help him improve his consistency.

Reporting at the World Baseball Classic, Suzuki observed that Yamamoto didn’t appear as devastated as other Japanese players in the wake of his country’s quarterfinal loss to Venezuela.

“I’m sure he was already looking ahead,” Suzuki said.

He always has, and he’s usually found a way to reach his destination.