‘He knows what he’s looking for’: How Yamamoto became baseball’s most coveted free agent
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
YOSHINOBU YAMAMOTO’S BAG of tricks is an actual bag.
Inside it, he carries a yoga mat, wooden blocks, tiny soccer balls and mini-javelins. When he’s ready, the 25-year-old Yamamoto lays out his yoga mat, arches himself into a backbend and pretzels his body with the precision of a contortionist. He lifts himself into headstands and corkscrews his hips and legs. He pushes up into handstands and walks on his palms toward a wall, against which he can lean and balance on one hand. He steadies himself on the blocks to get the feel for his body’s positioning, and when he’s done with that he stands up and chucks the size 1 soccer balls into a wall to warm up his right arm. Then he heads to the field to fling the javelins distances inconceivable to his teammates, who try to replicate the practice and chuckle at their comparative ineptitude.
None of this is the typical training regimen for a pitcher — for most athletes, really, but particularly not in baseball, a paint-by-numbers sort of sport that sneers at anything out of the ordinary. There is room for independent thinkers, for those who dare try something different, but it comes with a prerequisite: greatness.
Yamamoto has earned the right to carry the black duffel — not only is he a great pitcher, but arguably the greatest ever in Nippon Professional Baseball. He won three straight MVP awards and three consecutive Sawamura Awards, Japan’s equivalent of the Cy Young. Now he is the best free agent in Major League Baseball, the one inspiring a bidding war among the game’s most moneyed teams that’s expected to conclude before the new year and perhaps as early as this week.
At 5-foot-10 and 176 pounds, Yamamoto will be among the smallest starting pitchers in MLB when he debuts next season. That all of his strength training comes from these tools — Yamamoto does not lift weights — confounds the baseball establishment. But then he throws a baseball and the questions melt away because few in the world can marry a fastball that runs up to 99 mph with a splitter that drops like a hypercoaster and a curveball that breaks 5½ feet. To impart that sort of force on a baseball at that size is the domain of a select few: Pedro Martinez and Tim Lincecum, winners of five Cy Youngs between them.
Everything Yamamoto does is in service of one goal: moving with purpose. As MLB teams have learned since the Orix Buffaloes posted him Nov. 20, paving his way to sign with a major league team for hundreds of millions of dollars, Yamamoto’s meticulous, disciplined approach is not limited to the baseball field. Executives who have met with Yamamoto admire his preparedness. For years, he has awaited this moment. He peppered his Orix teammates who had played in the big leagues with questions about MLB. He overhauled his delivery to eliminate a weakness that could be exploited here. This year, he sent his best friend, who serves as his assistant, to Toronto to take English classes, travel to major league cities across the United States and collate information that would better inform his ultimate decision.
“He knew what he was getting himself into going into the season,” said Lars Nootbaar, the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder who befriended Yamamoto when playing for Team Japan during the World Baseball Classic. “Publicly and amongst friends, he is the nicest, most caring person there is. But underneath that, he’s a stone-cold killer. When he walks in a room, he’s not just walking in. He knows what he’s looking for. He takes notes on everything.”
JACOB WAGUESPACK SIGNED with Orix before the 2022 season, and soon learned his new teammate Yamamoto had won his first Sawamura the previous season. Waguespack, who played with the Toronto Blue Jays for two seasons, stands 6-foot-6, weighs 235 pounds and sits around 92 mph with his fastball. How someone 8 inches shorter and 60 pounds lighter possessed the arsenal of MLB’s best aces made no sense.
“I didn’t know he was that much of the real deal until I got there,” Waguespack said. “And then I was like, holy s—. The hype is real.”
Following his first season in Japan, Waguespack saw Yamamoto as one of his closest friends on the team. He watched Yamamoto walk around Osaka, where the Buffaloes play, with a hat and a mask to avoid hordes of fans swarming him. He knew Yamamoto rarely traveled without his tiny, fluffy dog, Mikan, named after Japan’s famous mandarin orange whose peel nearly matches the pup’s fur color. And he watched his arm just keep getting better.
The scouting report on Yamamoto reads something like this: hyperathletic, elite flexibility, unlikely strength, ultrafast arm, exceptional movement patterns. His fastball sits at 95 mph, though velocity alone doesn’t begin to describe why the pitch so flummoxes hitters. Yamamoto releases the ball from a low arm slot and has exceptional carry on his fastball, meaning its pure backspin causes it to drop less than a batter expects, so it looks as if it were rising. His splitter is every bit as dangerous as Kodai Senga‘s vaunted ghost fork, his curve out of the Adam Wainwright book of bend, his slider and cutter rarely used but each potentially a weapon against MLB hitters.
Since transitioning from the bullpen to Orix’s rotation as a 20-year-old in 2019, Yamamoto has posted a 1.65 ERA over 820⅓ innings. Batters have hit .189 against him and struck out in more than 27% of plate appearances. His walk rate is minuscule (2.0 per nine innings), his home run rate silly (0.32 per nine) and his win-loss record impressive (65-26). In the past three seasons, Yamamoto has ERAs of 1.39, 1.68 and 1.21. He faced 636 batters this year and yielded two homers — all with a brand-new delivery.
“He comes to camp [in 2023] with a new windup, and it’s like, dude, are you s—ting me?” Waguespack said. “He felt like he needed more momentum to the plate. The game was so easy to him, he felt like he could get better at one thing, and he did it.”
Gone was Yamamoto’s leg lift, replaced by a slide step to the plate. Not a typical out-of-the-stretch slide step, though. Yamamoto still started in a traditional windup, only to burst toward home plate — in a fashion that’s almost jarring, simply because no other pitcher does it — with his lead leg barely off the ground. Yamamoto’s clearest weakness, scouts had observed, was keeping runners at bay. He had long been too slow to the plate. After the change, he allowed four stolen bases all season, a quarter of what he had given up in 2022.
Yamamoto was moving with a dual purpose, and his athleticism eased the evolution. His new delivery called for more explosiveness, and rather than achieve that through added bulk, he remained steadfast in his ways, relying on a movement guru — he goes by Yata Sensei, and one source familiar with his work called him a kinetics expert — to design his training program.
“Over here, everyone puts such an emphasis on lifting weights, getting big, getting strong,” said Jacob Nix, who played for the San Diego Padres before joining Orix this year. “And over there, they stretch and they throw. These guys long toss almost every day. Their light days, they’re still going out 200-plus feet. It’s a totally different style of baseball and training than we do here.”
Added Nootbaar: “It is definitely unique — not the norm here. It’s not a lot of weight-bearing. It almost feels like the Tom Brady pliability, flexibility, elasticity sort of thing. He’s adding strength in the positions he’s getting in, but he’s always making sure he’s moving at a top level.”
For all of Yamamoto’s popularity, nobody appreciates the way he throws as much as his peers. Even as he moves at high rates of speed, his head remains remarkably still throughout his delivery, eyes toward the plate. When his front foot strikes the ground, his right arm is vertical — “in the right spot on every pitch,” Waguespack said — and his hips still closed, ready to fire and carry his arm for the ride.
This winter in Los Angeles, Cleveland Guardians reliever Eli Morgan and Minnesota Twins starter Joe Ryan have worked out alongside Yamamoto and marveled at his abilities. Yamamoto, along with a catcher, his best friend and a trainer, sits in a circle with them and they stretch their hips. The soccer balls appear, as do the javelins. When Yamamoto starts playing catch — from a variety of different positions: step-ins, modified crow hops, his new windup — and unleashes his four-seam fastball, Morgan can’t help but gawk.
“It’s the carry he gets on the ball,” Morgan said. “As someone who throws a four-seamer myself, that’s the goal. Get the ball to your partner on a frozen rope.”
Like everyone who sees Yamamoto, Morgan came away a believer. He’s 5-foot-10, too, and he knows it’s easy for teams to get hung up on things, like height. Yamamoto is also facing questions about adjusting from pitching one day a week in Japan to every fifth day in MLB or how he’ll handle a ball with lower seams and less tack or how the looping curve will play in a league where hitters pray to see one upon which they can prey. All these concerns are valid. They’re also not enough to stop the coming frenzy.
WHEN YAMAMOTO’S INTENTION to join MLB crystallized earlier this year, executives started guessing what it would cost to sign him. Because he’s 25, Yamamoto is no longer considered an international amateur and limited by shallow signing-bonus pools. Likewise, because he’s 25, he is hitting free agency at an age no pitcher — particularly not an elite one — reaches the open market. The first wave of guesses clocked in around $175 million. By the time free agency started, teams figured the bidding would start at $200 million. In recent weeks, it has jumped to $250 million. And recently, multiple reports suggested teams already had offered Yamamoto deals in excess of $300 million.
Those reports, sources said, are inaccurate. Multiple high-ranking officials trying to sign Yamamoto told ESPN that teams were asked to give a preliminary bid at the start of the process to ensure they were serious — but not necessarily in the neighborhood of where the deal is likely to land. Since then, those officials say, his agent, Joel Wolfe, has not solicited a new round of bids. Some teams, sources said, were interested in talking dollars recently but were asked not to do so yet; the expectation is that teams will start proposing contract terms as early as Monday.
Yamamoto’s meetings have been with a who’s who of big-market teams. Among the visitors to see him pitch in Japan this year were Los Angeles Dodgers president Andrew Friedman, New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, San Francisco Giants president Farhan Zaidi and Chicago Cubs president Jed Hoyer. Less than two weeks ago, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen and president David Stearns flew to Japan for dinner with Yamamoto and his mother. They all wanted to see up close what they’d long heard from afar: Yamamoto is special well beyond the otherworldly numbers he puts up annually, and sojourning halfway around the world to indicate the seriousness of their interest was a small price.
Since Yamamoto came to the U.S. this winter, among those reported to have entertained him are the Philadelphia Phillies, Dodgers, Giants and Red Sox, along with the Mets and Yankees twice each — which will only fuel the talk of a $300 million deal. The question is whether it reaches that number before or after the inclusion of the posting fee, which, for a $250 million contract, would be $39.4 million, or, at $300 million, would be $46.9 million.
The overall dollar figure also will depend on Yamamoto’s priorities. Because of his age, he could sign a seven-year deal and hit free agency again at 32. He could target a 10-year contract but request an opt-out after the fourth season and be back on the market at 29. Teams could try to lock him up to a lifetime deal — a dozen years or more — that would dampen the competitive-balance-tax hit by lowering the average annual value of the contract.
What’s clear is that, like with his countryman and WBC teammate Shohei Ohtani, the power to dictate terms is in Yamamoto’s hands. For the concerns about moving to MLB, he need only point to Ohtani, Mets starter Kodai Senga and others whose moves to MLB went off with only minor hitches. Even with a free agent market that still has National League Cy Young winner Blake Snell and a trade market featuring Cy Young winners Corbin Burnes and Shane Bieber along with Dylan Cease, Yamamoto is the clear top choice of baseball’s biggest spenders.
All of it tickles Nootbaar. Even if the Cardinals are on the outside looking in, he feels a kinship with Yamamoto that dates to the WBC. Nootbaar was born and raised in California but joined Samurai Japan because his mom, Kumiko, grew up in the prefecture next to Tokyo. At first, Nootbaar said, the language barrier felt like an impediment — something Yamamoto noticed. He invited Nootbaar to dinner with the team’s young stars — right-handers Roki Sasaki and Hiroto Takahashi, left-hander Hiroya Miyagi and third baseman Munetaka Murakami — along with Ippei Mizuhara, Ohtani’s interpreter.
“Everything they did meant so much,” Nootbaar said. “They were doing it for me. But they were also doing it for the team. And that’s why as he goes through this process, I know he’s going to make the right choice. He’s concerned about the right things in his life.”
Wherever Yamamoto lands, he’ll pack his stuff — including his bag — and head off to the best baseball league in the world, the truest test of how good he really is. Whatever happens when he arrives, if it’s anything like how he handles the rest of his life, it will be purposeful — and great.
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Andrea Adelson
ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.
He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.
But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.
UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.
“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.
He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.
“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”
Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”
Meat grinder of some other places.
Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?
“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”
Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.
He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.
But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.
“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”
Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.
“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”
In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.
After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.
“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”
If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”
Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.
Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.
“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”
McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.
“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”
Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.
“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”
UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.
Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.
This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.
“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.
“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.
After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.
“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”
The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.
When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.
“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”
The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.
That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.
After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.
That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.
But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.
“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”
The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.
This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.
Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.
“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”
Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.
“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”
To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”
You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.
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Max Olson
Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.
Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.
The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.
LSU has assembled one of the top incoming transfer classes in the country this offseason with 18 signees, including six players — wide receivers Barion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma), linemen Braelin Moore (Virginia Tech) and Josh Thompson (Northwestern), cornerback Mansoor Delane (Virginia Tech) and defensive end Patrick Payton (LSU) — who ranked among the top 60 in ESPN’s winter transfer rankings.
The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.
Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.
As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.
Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.
BYU picked up a pair of key transfer portal additions Saturday, as brothers Bear and Tiger Bachmeier told ESPN that they have committed to play for the Cougars next season.
The brothers are transferring from Stanford and project to be key players of the immediate and long-term plans for the BYU program.
Bear, a quarterback, committed Saturday morning at the end of his visit, he told ESPN. He is a class of 2025 recruit who committed to Stanford out of high school and enrolled there this spring.
Both Bachmeiers elected to transfer in the wake of Stanford’s dismissal of head coach Troy Taylor in March. After visiting BYU coach Kalani Sitake’s program in recent days, the brothers committed.
For Bear, he is expected to be one of the backups for successful incumbent quarterback Jake Retzlaff in 2025 and compete for the starting job at BYU in 2026.
Bear was attracted to BYU’s open offensive scheme and a rich history of quarterbacks that includes a strong recent run under offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick. He also referenced BYU’s historical success, which stretches from Jim McMahon to Ty Detmer to Steve Young.
“The ability to come in and win games and [Coach] Roderick’s scheme and the pedigree of quarterbacks they have produced in history and recently is enticing,” Bear told ESPN.
Tiger told ESPN he committed to BYU later Saturday. He’ll arrive at BYU having graduated from Stanford in two-and-a-half years with a degree in computer science. He’ll enroll in a graduate program at BYU, he said.
Tiger will be expected to be an immediate contributor at wide receiver. He caught 46 balls over two seasons at Stanford for 476 yards and two touchdowns. He has two years of eligibility remaining.
Bear and Tiger are the second and third brothers to play major college football in their family. Their older brother, Hank Bachmeier, played quarterback at Boise State, Louisiana Tech and Wake Forest, where his college career concluded last year.
There is one more Bachmeier brother remaining: Buck Bachmeier will be a freshman in high school in the fall.
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