The Los Angeles Dodgers went to work this off-season. Not only did they add the best player in the league, Shohei Ohtani, they also signed the best available pitcher in the free agent market, Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Although Yamamoto has yet to pitch in the major leagues, he was the most coveted pitcher on the market. Teams were clamoring for his talent. The Dodgers' offer of a 12-year, $325 million contract won out in the end, besting the San Francisco Giants, New York Mets, and New York Yankees at the end of a long free-agent process.
Team officials say little in public while courting a free agent. Wednesday, Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes was free to rave about his new ace.
And he was gushing.
“Being able to watch Yoshinobu pitch — the stuff is special, and the command is something that I haven’t seen,” Gomes said. “It is up there with the upper echelon of guys that can command the baseball. There’s no question in our mind that his commitment and dedication to taking care of himself that he will get in a good routine and on that rotation schedule at some point, and that’s just something we can talk through as a group.”
Yes, he's only done it in the Japanese league, but it's the second-best league in the world. Digital pitch-tracking tools are available there that allow for direct comparisons to pitch characteristics of major league hurlers. If the stuff plays there, it'll play here. That tends to be the industry consensus around Yamamoto.
In seven seasons in the Nippon Professional Baseball League, he went 70-29 with a 1.82 ERA, 922 strikeouts, 0.93 WHIP. He only allowed 181 earned runs in 897 innings pitched.
Those numbers are incredible, and it was enough for the Dodgers to be sold. Gomes was sufficiently impressed with what Yamamoto accomplished in NPB.
“The fact that he’s done what he’s done in the NPB is unique,” Gomes said. “His age, what we know about the person, that entire combination of it all is something that we felt was special and something that we felt comfortable in making that investment.”
Talent travels. If Yamamoto is even half of what he was in the NPB, the Dodgers got themselves a good one.
More must-reads: