Yamamoto sharp after rocky debut; Dodgers lose
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES — Yoshinobu Yamamoto‘s debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers, on the heels of attaining the largest contract ever for a starting pitcher, lasted only one inning and saw him get charged with five earned runs, nearly a quarter of his total through an entire prior season in Japan. It followed two rough outings in spring training, casting early doubt on Yamamoto’s ability to transition to the world’s most advanced baseball league in the United States.
“There’s a lot of confidence and there’s a lot of pride and fire,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of Yamamoto, an athlete he is still learning. “And appreciating the contract and his part of the deal — I think he takes it personal. And took it personal. He was really intent on pitching well for his home debut.”
Yamamoto, making his second start nine days after a nightmare opener from South Korea, kept the St. Louis Cardinals scoreless through five mostly dominant innings on Saturday night and would have pitched deeper into the game if not for the 35-minute rain delay that occurred after the fourth.
Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly allowed five runs in the top of the seventh and Shohei Ohtani flied out with his team trailing by one and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th, prompting a 6-5 loss — but the encouragement around Yamamoto’s start overcame all of that.
Yamamoto, speaking through an interpreter, said he felt like he “had my stuff back.” He added that he didn’t make many adjustments heading in but was simply “calm today.”
“You hate to admit it or say it, but I think it was more nerves than anything,” Dodgers assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness said of the struggles around his first start. “For him to kind of be able to get through that and experience that, that inning snowballing on him, to watch him bounce back the way he did — he’s a special talent, man.”
Yamamoto struck out five hitters, including the first three he faced, and generated eight of his nine swings and misses on his splitter and curveball. The latter has often been used as a pitch to get back into counts, as opposed to a splitter that works to finish hitters off, but McGuiness was encouraged to see Yamamoto get in-zone swings and misses with a curveball that is by far his slowest pitch, thrown mostly in the upper-70s.
Yamamoto’s upper-90s four-seam fastball, another elite pitch that is hard to pick up from his low arm slot, was thrown for a strike 79% of the time on Saturday, compared with 43% of the time in Korea. The cutter, a pitch he uses mostly to dart in on opposing left-handed batters, was mostly abandoned because the other three offerings were working so well, McGuiness added.
“He did an amazing job bouncing back, not letting the first one affect him,” said Dodgers outfielder-turned-shortstop Mookie Betts, who homered for the fourth time on Saturday and is riding a 2.109 OPS through his first five games. “Even the day of that first start, you couldn’t really tell what went on. It’s really neat to see someone with a lot of pressure and whatnot on him handle everything so well.”
Yamamoto won three consecutive MVPs with the Orix Buffaloes in Japan, then signed a 12-year, $325 million contract with the Dodgers on Dec. 21, agreeing to terms 12 days after Ohtani landed a 10-year, $700 million deal. Yamamoto wowed teammates with his stuff and command early in camp. But he gave up nine runs in 7⅔ innings in his last two Cactus League starts, then was shelled by the San Diego Padres in his regular-season debut, allowing four hits, a walk, a hit by pitch and a wild pitch before recording the third out.
Yamamoto made a subtle adjustment heading into his second start, keeping his hands slightly higher when he gets to a set position in his windup before breaking his right hand away from his glove to fire a pitch. It helped to sync up his delivery, Roberts said. The Dodgers, though, didn’t overwhelm him with recommendations heading into his Dodger Stadium debut. In the early stages of their relationship, they’ve been letting Yamamoto and his personal trainer, Osamu Yada, set the tone.
“It’s definitely a new style for us to look at, so we’re excited to kind of learn from him,” McGuiness said. “We really are just trying to learn his verbiage and playbook and how he goes about it. Just make sure he’s comfortable out there. We’ll slowly teach him some of the things as we go along. But it was really impressive for him to bounce back the way he did, not worry about the delay, go give us the extra inning. That was massive for the bullpen. I couldn’t have been more proud of what he did today.”
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Tim Keown
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freeman was scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
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