TORONTO — A 66-year-old man with a pierced left ear and a backward cap stood in the outfield at Rogers Centre early Sunday morning and beheld all that surrounded him. Tri-color confetti littered the turf, the videoboard in center field touted the Los Angeles Dodgers’ latest World Series championship, and Osamu Yada — the man who made it all possible — grinned at his great fortune.
Yamamoto met Yada in Osaka, where the pitcher arrived in 2017 as an 18-year-old selected in the fourth round of the NPB draft by the Buffaloes. Yada works outside the professional-baseball infrastructure in Japan and is regarded by some as an interloper. In Yamamoto, he found a willing and eager pupil. With a natural curiosity and voracious work ethic, Yamamoto’s greatest quality, Yada said, was his patience.
“Yoshinobu will say things like, ‘I want to be able to do this,’ ” Yada said. “And I’ll tell him, ‘OK, in two years you’ll be able to do that.’ And then in two years he is actually able to do that.”
Front office executives and scouts flocked to Osaka in 2023, aware that Yamamoto was likely to enter Major League Baseball’s posting system — the portal through which Japanese players are transferred to big league teams — that forthcoming winter. Yada invited officials to his headquarters to better understand the ideology that seemed so foreign.
“Watching people work at his clinic in Osaka is special,” said Galen Carr, the Dodgers’ vice president of player personnel and a fixture in international scouting. “They do things with their bodies — contortions and twisting and balance and strength — and it’s body weight, not stuff we do here. And somehow that kid throws 98 and he’s 5-10. … Maybe we can learn something from him.”
The shockwaves from his contract rippled with similar ferocity to Ohtani’s. At least Ohtani had dominated MLB for six years and won a pair of MVPs. Yamamoto hadn’t thrown a single big league pitch, and the Dodgers guaranteed him more money than any pitcher in the game’s history. And when he arrived at spring training flanked by a sexagenarian whose standard uniform was a blazer over a T-shirt, teammates initially side-eyed him, struggling to fathom the multitudes Yamamoto contained.
Soon enough they cherished the whole of Yamamoto. His diligence astounded them. His pitches — fastball, sinker, splitter, cutter, slider, curveball — wowed them. Yada endeared himself quickly to the rest of the pitching staff as well as former MVP Mookie Betts, all of whom learned to appreciate that behind the endless appetite for Sprite and lemonade and other break-room foodstuffs was a professor of the craft, someone set upon making Yamamoto every bit as good in MLB as he was in NPB.
“It’s the most meticulous game plan I’ve ever seen,” Dodgers right-hander Ben Casparius said. “He’s the best, purest pitcher I’ve ever seen in my life. And I don’t think it’s close.”
Still, the entire conceit felt too good to be true, a self-laid trap-in-waiting. Even if Yamamoto did enter the game, how long could he go? How sore would his arm feel? As much as the Dodgers believed in Yamamoto and Yada Sensei, surely there were limits to the power of their partnership.
DURING THE ON-FIELD celebration of Los Angeles’ 3-1 victory in Game 6, teammates moshed around Miguel Rojas, who had caught a dart of a throw from Kiké Hernández to complete a game-ending double play. Amid the hugs and backslaps, Rojas felt a sharp pain in his rib area. The timing could not have been worse.
Nonetheless, Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow said, “Miggy is the glue of our team.” He wields the microphone on team flights and bus rides. He is, Glasnow said, “the curator of s–t-talking in the best possible way.” And in Game 6, with center fielder Andy Pages in an October-long slump, Rojas — without a hit since Oct. 1 — was named the starting second baseman and No. 9 hitter, with Roberts moving super-utility man Tommy Edman to center and benching Pages.
The tears of joy nearly morphed into those of sadness come the bottom of the inning. Bichette singled with one out off Dodgers starter Blake Snell, on in relief, and was pinch run for by Isiah Kiner-Falefa. Addison Barger drew a walk in a nine-pitch plate appearance. Roberts went to the mound. The bullpen door swung open. Out came Yamamoto.
“My heart was jumping out of my chest,” said Ishihara, Yamamoto’s close friend, “because I didn’t think it would actually happen.”
On his first pitch to Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk, Yamamoto ripped a 93-mph splitter for a strike. Immediately it was clear Yada was correct: the quality of Yamamoto’s stuff would not be a question. His command of it, on the other hand, was tested on the next pitch, a sinker that ran inside and clipped Kirk’s hand, loading the bases for Blue Jays center fielder Daulton Varsho.
“I’m just hoping I got enough,” Smith said. “I knew I hit it pretty good. But we’ve hit a lot of balls hard here in this stadium that just haven’t got out. They just kind of came up a little short. So it was nice to finally get one.”
“I bet on Yama because I just felt there’s just something inside of his soul that I completely believed in. And even Miggy Ro in a different context, where everything says you hit for him, I just believed that he was going to do something special.”
ON THE DAY of Game 7, the Instagram page for Yada Sensei’s clinic posted three emojis of people bowing with sheepish looks on their faces. Above them was a message in Japanese thanking its patients for their patronage and informing them Yada will soon return to Osaka and that he will start taking appointments Nov. 5.
“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by our prolonged business trip,” the post said.
“He’s genuine. He’s responsible. He’s very straightforward,” Yada said. “He doesn’t lose sight of his dreams.”
“For him to do three ups and hold his stuff the way he did — it was every bit as good as it was in Game 6 — is literally the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen on a Major League Baseball field,” Friedman said.
At the Dodgers’ party following the win, highlights from the night played on a screen and the high of the night never lost its sheen. Yamamoto was feted as a legend, a hero, but all that mattered, Yada said, is “he just really, really wanted to be a champion with his teammates.”
He is, for the second time, still on that path to growth, embracing tariki hongan from the 25 men surrounding him and manifesting jiriki hongan with his own will, desire, fortitude. It’s true, yes, that Yada built Yoshinobu Yamamoto into what he is today. But outrageous things take more than a sensei or a code. They take a man willing to do things others wouldn’t dare dream of.
The only other pitcher in baseball history to chase a Game 6 start with a Game 7 relief outing on zero days’ rest and emerge with victories in both was Randy Johnson in the 2001 World Series, widely regarded among the best ever. Both pitchers won World Series MVP awards, riding fastballs that neared triple digits and off-speed pitches that bedeviled the hitters hubristic enough to offer at them. The similarities end there. At 5-foot-10, Yamamoto stands a full foot shorter than Johnson, who leveraged his size into five Cy Young Awards and a first-ballot Hall of Fame induction. Yamamoto, at 170 pounds, learned through Yada to find his power from the place where body meets nature and the two coalesce harmoniously.
All the while, Yada remained calm, a palliative presence. While Yada says to “just think of me as a loudmouth grandpa,” he is the key that unlocked the whole of Yamamoto. During a presentation to Dodgers employees in the spring of 2024, Yamamoto’s first with the team after signing a 12-year, $325 million contract upon his departure from Nippon Professional Baseball’s Orix Buffaloes, Yada tried to explain Yamamoto’s training habits using comparisons from the world of anime. Yamamoto, he said, was like Goku in “Dragon Ball Z” or One-Punch Man, what they do and who they are indistinguishable. Yamamoto was forever seeking to harness the power of nature that takes a man and makes him something more.
Within two years of joining the Buffaloes, Yamamoto was a fixture in their rotation and atop ERA leaderboards in NPB. He won the Sawamura Award, given to the best starting pitcher in Japan, in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the first to capture three consecutive in more than 60 years. During the 2023 season, his closest friend, Yoichi Ishihara, spent the summer in Toronto to be able to tell Yamamoto what life in a major league city looked like. Yamamoto had conquered Japanese baseball and set his eyes on the big leagues.
For years, Dodgers scouts had admired him. They marveled not only at his stuff but the methods that extracted it from him. Yamamoto was the antithesis of the muscled-up, high-effort pitchers the American youth-development system churned out. He never lifted a weight under Yada’s tutelage. Instead, they focused on mobility and balance, breathing and pliability. He did handstands and threw mini-soccer balls. Yada introduced him to a featherweight javelin so light that any deviation from proper mechanical sequencing would cause it to flutter and die. Over time, Yamamoto learned to launch it great distances with a delicate touch.
The ups and downs of Yamamoto’s debut season — he spent three months on the injured list with arm issues — vanished by the postseason last year, when he helped carry an injury-depleted Los Angeles to a championship. He resisted the urge to alter his training methodologies over the winter, sticking with Yada’s program and long tossing almost daily. Greatness found him this season, when he finished fourth in MLB with a 2.49 ERA over 173⅔ innings, and his back-to-back complete games in the playoffs marked the first such feat for pitchers in nearly a quarter century.
The 36-year-old Rojas spent nearly a decade in the minor leagues before debuting with the Dodgers in 2014. Los Angeles traded him to the Marlins that winter — in a deal that sent Hernández back to the Dodgers — and saw him grow into a beloved utility man, the conscience of the clubhouse. He returned to Los Angeles in a January 2023 trade and spent the past three seasons as a versatile option for Roberts. He was slated to start at shortstop before Betts’ switch from outfield to the position resigned Rojas to a part-time role.