To Clayton Kershaw, it was more than just a pitchers' duel.
As Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jacob deGrom traded zeroes at Globe Life Field in Texas last week, Kershaw sat in the dugout, mesmerized by what he could only describe as an exhibition in pitching excellence.
“Those two guys, that’s how it should look when you pitch,” Kershaw said a few days later. “The fluidness, the effortlessness, the way it comes out of your hand. That’s how you should throw. DeGrom and Yama are two of the best that just, like, make it look really easy.”
For deGrom, a two-time Cy Young Award winner and four-time All-Star, such plaudits are nothing new. But for Yamamoto, the second-year big leaguer blossoming as one of the sport’s best starters, it was a sign of how far — and how quickly — his young MLB career has progressed.
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“He’s learned his way really well,” Kershaw said. “And honestly fast, for what it was.”
Last year, as a rookie with massive expectations following his record-breaking $325-million signing out of Japan, Yamamoto was good. Great at times, even. He went 7-2 with a 3.00 earned-run average. He struck out 105 in just 90 innings. He was the Dodgers’ Game 1 starter for the National League Division Series.
And yet, it often felt like something was missing. Like there was another level he couldn’t consistently reach.
“As we can all expect or imagine, there was a lot of uncertainty,” manager Dave Roberts recalled this spring of Yamamoto’s acclimation process. “I wouldn’t say anxiety. But [he was] new somewhere. And there’s expectations that everyone has.”
Entering Year 2, those expectations still were present. And one month in they’ve easily been met — if not surpassed.
Through six starts Yamamoto is all over statistical leaderboards, entering Saturday ranked first in the NL in ERA (1.06), fourth in strikeouts (43), sixth in innings pitched (34) and top-10 in both walks plus hits per inning pitched (1.00) and batting average against (.190).
And that was after arguably his worst start of the season Friday night, a loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in which he gave up three runs (one earned) on five hits and a career-high four walks over five innings in another high-profile pitchers' duel against Paul Skenes.
“Certainly there's a lot of talent,” Roberts said of Yamamoto. “But it just speaks to how great he wants to be, his own expectations, the work that he puts in to continue to stay at the top of this game."
Beyond the work, Yamamoto’s transformation has, in the view of many around the team, also come down to a few simple things: more confidence in himself, more comfort in his surroundings and more conviction on the mound.
“Today’s stuff was obviously a little bit of a struggle,” Yamamoto, ever-modest, said through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda after Friday’s start. “But if I evaluate my stuff up to this game, it [hasn’t been] bad.”
Getting there required last season’s growing pains. But now he's blossoming into one of the best pitchers.
“It’s just human nature,” Kershaw said. “If you’ve been somewhere for a year, you get more comfortable, you get more acclimated. And when you have success, you gain confidence.”
After the Dodgers’ postseason opener last year, Kiké Hernández simply had a feeling.
While sitting in the dugout that night as an unused bench bat, the veteran utility man watched Yamamoto’s start against the San Diego Padres closely, trying to understand why a pitcher with so much talent had looked so out of sorts in a three-inning, five-run struggle in his postseason debut.
Hernández had long been convinced of Yamamoto’s potential, wowed by the pinpoint command of his upper-90s fastball and seemingly unhittable movement of his breaking pitches. Hernández had seen the proof of concept too, when Yamamoto blanked the New York Yankees over seven spectacular innings in the Bronx in June.
After that outing, however, Yamamoto suffered a shoulder injury that sidelined him for almost three months. And though he was healthy again by the time of his Game 1 start in the division series, Hernández couldn’t help but feel like the 26-year-old lacked the swaggering — or, at least, assertive — demeanor of a bona fide big league star.
“He was kinda down after Game 1,” Hernández said.
So, during the team’s day off in San Diego following Game 2, Hernández sought out Yamamoto for a one-on-one conversation — meeting with him and an interpreter from the Wasserman Media Group (the agency that represents both players) for almost two hours at a Starbucks on the ground floor of the club’s hotel.
“I just wanted to pick his brain,” Hernández said, “and know where his head was at.”
What Yamamoto shared was illuminating, expressing uncertainty about who he was as a big league pitcher and how to best deploy his arsenal against opposing lineups.
“I felt that he wasn’t very convicted with the pitches he was throwing,” Hernández said. “And he just mentioned that he was feeling a little overwhelmed.”
It was an understandable dilemma. Virtually all rookie pitchers — even those with previous professional experience in Japan — go through such an acclimation period, trying to refine raw talent into tangible results. That learning curve can be particularly steep with a club like the Dodgers, as pitchers have to balance their own personal preferences with the highly detailed game-planning information that goes into the team’s advanced scouting reports.
“When you’re throwing pitches that you don’t want to throw,” Hernández noted, “your conviction is not the same as when you are throwing a pitch that you are committed to throwing.”
Yamamoto’s season being shortened by injury to just 18 starts also detracted from that process. His language barrier with the coaching staff was yet another complication.
“I feel bad for these guys,” bench coach Danny Lehmann, a key voice in the team’s game-planning meetings, said of the challenges Yamamoto and other Japanese imports face early in their MLB careers. “The language barrier, the culture, all that stuff is just a lot. Especially going straight to the big leagues.”
Hernández, however, offered simple encouragement as the two finished coffee: Commit to throwing his best stuff and trust his premium talent would play no matter who stood in the batter’s box.
“I was like, ‘You are already one of the best pitchers on the planet,’” Hernández recounted. “But it still felt like there was more in there. And in order for him to come out and bring his best, he needed to be committed to the pitches he was throwing.”
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The message, evidently, resonated.
When Yamamoto made his next start, in a winner-take-all Game 5 of the NLDS, he pitched five scoreless innings to help the Dodgers to a series victory — then thanked Hernández and others in the clubhouse for their support.
“I owe my performance today to my teammates,” he said.
And ever since, Yamamoto hasn’t looked back.
Around the same time Yamamoto met with Hernández, he also had a breakthrough with the coaching staff.
The playoffs, Lehmann said, afforded the team’s so-called “run-prevent department” to take a deeper dive with each starting pitchers. They honed in especially close on Yamamoto, concerned he might have been tipping his pitches in his Game 1 defeat.
From that process, Lehmann recalled, “we got to get to know him a little bit better, and what he wants to do.”
“We just had more time to sit down and watch videos, like, ‘Here’s how your pitches play’ … Even the way his pitches play off each other,” the bench coach recalled. “I think he had a better sense of what we’re spewing at him, and how to decipher it.”
After his Game 5 gem, Yamamoto was solid again in Game 4 of the NL Championship Series (4⅓ innings, two runs, eight strikeouts) and terrific in Game 2 of the World Series (6⅓ innings, one run, four strikeouts), serving as the backbone of a shorthanded, championship-winning pitching staff.
“He was a different animal,” Hernández said.
It carried into spring training, when Yamamoto became an immediate standout with his renewed poise and consistent daily work ethic.
“The way Yama throws long toss is amazing,” Kershaw said.
And over the opening month of this season, Yamamoto’s confident mound presence has been mirrored behind the scenes, the pitcher becoming more vocal in game-planning meetings and assured in his clubhouse demeanor.
“You just see, like, his body language, the way he carries himself this year, there’s so much more security in himself,” Hernández said. “When you have that confidence that, ‘Hey, I can do it. I can do it at the highest level.’ That’s what it looks like to me. He’s just so much more confident in his entire routine. He just seems very, very comfortable in his own skin.”
It was all reflected in the pride he took from last week’s duel against deGrom, outpitching the Texas Rangers star with seven shutout innings and a career-best strikeout-to-walk ratio of 10 to 0.
“He elevated his game to another level,” Roberts said. “You could see that he was going against one of the game's best in deGrom, and he obviously matched him pitch for pitch.”
It was evident again in the disappointment Yamamoto felt following Friday’s loss to the Pirates, when lacked his typical command while getting bested by Skene’s 6⅓ scoreless frames.
“I was falling behind in the count, and then I couldn’t establish my rhythm,” Yamamoto said. “I couldn’t grind through and get myself out of trouble.”
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It was another lesson, but this time in a different context. No longer is Yamamoto looking for validation at the big league level. Now it’s about polishing the rest of his rapidly improving game.
“I don’t think it’s rocket science,” Kershaw said. “That’s just like life in any business, or any avenue. You get more comfortable, you get more confident, as you have success and do it.”
Then, thinking back to Yamamoto’s start against the Rangers, the future Hall of Famer paid Yamamoto one of the biggest compliments he could.
“The way he throws,” Kershaw said, “is how I think you would teach it.”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
