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.
Yada Sensei, as he is known, plays a number of roles for Dodgers right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto, whose performance in Los Angeles’ 5-4 victory in Game 7 of the World Series will go down in the annals of baseball history. Yada is a biomechanist first and foremost, obsessive about how the body’s movement patterns apply force to a baseball. Beyond that, he is a philosophical guru, a bridge between the ocean-wide chasm that separates Japanese baseball, where Yamamoto formed his foundation, and American baseball, where he erected his masterwork upon it.
“He’s the person who built me,” Yamamoto said.
What Yada shaped blossomed into something mythical during an all-time great World Series that culminated with a Game 7 for the ages, requiring 11 nerve-wracking, drama-filled innings. Working on no rest after a six-inning, 96-pitch effort to set up the Dodgers for a Game 6 victory and send the series to a winner-takes-all seventh game, Yamamoto materialized from the Dodgers’ bullpen to spread 34 pitches over 2⅔ scoreless innings and secure the win that delivered Los Angeles its second consecutive championship and third in six years. All of that on the heels of Yamamoto’s complete-game triumph in Game 2, which followed a start-to-finish effort in his previous outing in the National League Championship Series.
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.
“Think about a tree,” Yada said. “A tree has a trunk, it has branches, it has roots. In the sports world, we tell people to move their hands this way, their feet this way, and that’s just moving the branches. The most important thing with the tree is the trunk. It can’t just be firm, either. If the trunk is hollow, then it might just snap in half easily. So you can think about what I’m doing as building a strong trunk that can stand up to strong rain and wind. There’s nothing wrong with any individual thing that’s being taught over here. It’s just that I’m trying to have a perspective of the whole, and I don’t give him any specific instruction on any individual thing. Just trying to keep an eye on the whole, the bigger vision.”
That vision registered 20/10 during this postseason, a monthlong love letter to baseball. The 2025 World Series started with the Blue Jays, seeking their first championship since 1993, dropping a nine-run inning and sending the whole of Rogers Centre into a frenzy and ended with the Dodgers salvaging their season with a game-tying home run from the unlikeliest hitter with one out in the ninth inning and going ahead with another homer in the 11th. It dispensed memorable moments like an IV drip, consistent and satiating. For Game 7 to live up to the standard set by the previous six, which included an 18-inning classic Game 3 won by the Dodgers on a walk-off home run and a star-making Game 5 by Toronto rookie right-hander Trey Yesavage, only reinforced the 121st World Series’ place among its most extolled brethren.
With their pitching running on fumes, the Dodgers had turned to Shohei Ohtani, Yamamoto’s countryman and the finest talent the game has ever seen, to start Game 7 on three days’ rest. In the third inning, Bo Bichette blasted a 442-foot, three-run home run off him, igniting the 44,713 in attendance and forcing Los Angeles into scramble mode. Things got hairy in the fourth, when Justin Wrobleski hit Andrés Giménez with an up-and-in pitch that prompted the benches and bullpens to clear. The tension intensified in the eighth, when a Max Muncy solo home run cut Los Angeles’ deficit to 4-3. And it never relented during the game’s final innings, when the Dodgers, who batted .203 and were outscored 34-26 in the series, turned to Yamamoto to play savior.
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.
“There are things that are natural in nature, and then there are things that are normal in the sports world,” Yada said. “And what I’ve been able to do is teach Yoshinobu about things that occur in the natural world. And because the general philosophies and the things that are accepted are so different when you look at it from a sporting sense, it seems like something that’s outrageous.”
IN OSAKA, JAPAN, sits a two-story building, about 1,200 square feet total, that serves as the nerve center of Yada’s operation — “Japan’s No. 1 Spiritual and Physical Strength Shop,” its website proudly states. The path to growth, the site says, is through tariki hongan (relying on other power) and jiriki hongan (self-reliance). Yada ends every post on the website with the same two sentences: “I hope you have a good day today. Don’t forget your childhood and pursue your dreams!”
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.”
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.
“It’s easy to use one muscle at 100% output,” Yada said, “but what Yoshinobu is trying to do is to use 600 different muscles at 10% output. You can’t think about 600 things at once and throw. So it’s learning to prioritize which parts of the movement are the most important. And learning to have that conversation with yourself about where there might be imbalances and how to correct those things.
“We often talk about moving specific joints in certain ways, and when you try to approach what we’re trying to do, you always run into these conflicts between various things. The way of approaching things that way can be explained by Newtonian physics. What he’s trying to do is explained more by Eastern philosophies. And so it’s difficult to find a common language, and it’s difficult to talk about.”
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.”
Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers president of baseball operations, wasn’t sold until he saw it himself. At the Kyocera Dome in Osaka, he watched Yamamoto long-toss from the right-field corner to home plate. Yamamoto wasn’t taking crow hops or hurling parabolic throws. “I wish someone had videoed me watching that before the game,” Friedman said, “because my mouth was agape.” Even if the list of short, slim, front-line right-handed pitchers could be counted on one hand, the Dodgers were already perfectly happy to get into the outlier business, giving Ohtani a 10-year, $700 million contract Dec. 9.
The 45-day posting window for Yamamoto had opened by then, and a bidding frenzy was underway. What started in the $175 million range quickly ascended past $200 million. The New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Francisco Giants and Philadelphia Phillies felt the same way about Yamamoto as the Dodgers. They looked past the questions of whether he was too short or his hands too small to spin a major league ball. They believed.
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.”
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.
It was no surprise, then, that Yamamoto volunteered to pitch in Game 7 a day after he kept Los Angeles’ season alive. Following Game 6, Friedman received a text from Will Ireton, the team’s interpreter, that indicated Yamamoto was receiving treatment with the intention of pitching the next day. Yada indicated that Friedman need not worry about injury or effectiveness. Yamamoto’s stuff was going to be the same regardless of rest. Another text arrived Saturday morning, saying trainers were preparing Yamamoto to pitch, and one more after he played catch, affirming his ability to get meaningful outs for manager Dave Roberts.
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.
At 11:31 p.m., after one of the most implausible home runs in World Series history, they would learn the answer.
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.
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 set 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.
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.
On Friday night, the revival of that lineup for Game 7 was in question. The Dodgers went to bed believing Rojas would not be available and that they might need to replace him on the roster with outfielder Michael Conforto. Rojas woke up Saturday morning still in pain. He went to the stadium at 1:30 p.m., received “a lot of meds and injections,” he said, and tested out the rib in the batting cage. The pain was dulled enough that Rojas told Roberts he wanted to play. Roberts acceded. Rojas took another round of painkillers before first pitch and found himself at the plate in the ninth inning, with the Dodgers trailing, 4-3, and one out.
What happened next defined a Dodgers team outhit, outscored and outplayed by the Blue Jays for the majority of the series. Rojas was looking for a fastball from Toronto closer Jeff Hoffman to hit up the middle. He swung over a first-pitch slider in the dirt. Hoffman bounced a slider and fastball to move the count to 2-1 before Rojas fouled off a pair of fastballs. He stared at a slider just above the strike zone to work the count full. On the seventh pitch of the at-bat, Hoffman hung a slider. And Rojas, who in 4,159 career plate appearances has hit only 57 home runs, uncorked a swing for eternity.
Only once before had a player in Game 7 of the World Series hit a game-tying or go-ahead home run. As the ball sailed into the Blue Jays’ bullpen in left field, Rojas joined Bill Mazeroski, author of the homer that ended the 1960 World Series. The score was 4-4. The World Series that had played even for six games had reached that state in the ninth inning of its seventh.
“When he wasn’t getting his playing time, he went to the coaches and said, ‘Hey, how can I help out?’ ” Muncy said. “And he did everything that they asked him to do. He’s the ultimate team guy, and for him to get that home run to tie it up — it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.”
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.
Roberts’ strategic acumen, honed over nearly 120 postseason games, went into overdrive. He inserted Pages, a better defender with a far better arm than Edman, into center field, knowing a sacrifice fly could end the World Series. He pulled the infield in. And he let Yamamoto and catcher Will Smith go to work, knowing they needed to keep the ball down in the strike zone and hopefully induce a groundball. A splitter missed low. Varsho fouled off another. He stared at a 97 mph fastball for strike two. And on a third splitter, at the bottom of the zone and away from the left-handed Varsho, he yanked a grounder toward Rojas, who reached across his body to snag it — the pain searing in his side — and made an off-balance throw home. Had Kiner-Falefa taken even a one-step secondary lead off third base, he would have been safe. He didn’t. Smith leaned to grab Rojas’ throw that just beat a sliding Kiner-Falefa for the force.
Toronto wasn’t done. Ernie Clement stepped to the plate. He already had three hits, pushing him past Randy Arozarena for tops on the single-postseason hit list with 30. And he golfed a first-pitch Yamamoto curveball into deep left-center field. Pages and Hernández converged and collided, just as the ball settled into Pages’ glove. Hernández lay face down on the warning track, convinced the ball had skittered away and the series was over. Pages asked him if he was OK. Hernández wasn’t, because he thought they’d lost the World Series. Instead, Game 7 was headed to extra innings.
Like Toronto the previous half-inning, Los Angeles loaded the bases in the 10th with one out. Pages grounded into a force play at home, and three pitches later, reliever Seranthony Dominguez fielded a flip from first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr., danced around the first-base bag and toe-tapped it just before Hernández’s foot struck. Replay review upheld the call and sent the game to the bottom of the 10th, when Yamamoto emerged from the dugout for a second inning of work. He sat down three hitters on 13 pitches and surpassed Johnson’s four relief outs the day after his Game 6 start.
With a chance to play hero again in the top of the 11th, Rojas grounded out to third and, with the pain meds wearing off, felt a twinge in his side in the process. Ohtani, so brilliant all postseason, the one hitter upon whom the Dodgers could rely, grounded out. Up stepped Smith, who entered the postseason with a hairline fracture in his right hand. Elevated to the No. 2 spot because of Betts’ struggles, Smith worked the count to 2-0 against Toronto’s Game 5 starter, Shane Bieber, like so many others cosplaying as a reliever, and got a slider that settled in the middle of the zone. He did not miss. One step out of the batter’s box, he yelled, “Go ball,” imploring it to breach the fence. The ball bounced from the bullpen into the stands. Los Angeles led, 5-4.
“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.”
The Dodgers’ ninth championship beckoned, and Yamamoto emerged from the dugout to put the ultimate stamp on it. Pitching is about milliseconds and millimeters. Any minuscule change in timing, movement, grip and dozens of other factors runs the risk of frying a pitcher’s wiring. No such concern existed with Yamamoto, even in circumstances unfathomable to other pitchers. He is unbothered. He made himself for this moment.
“He put on his cape,” Hernández said, “and he took us to the promised land.”
A Guerrero leadoff double in the 11th, followed by a Kiner-Falefa sacrifice to get him to third with one out? It happens. A Barger walk on four splitters out of the zone? No worries. Because after getting Kirk down 0-2 on a cutter and curveball, Yamamoto unleashed a splitter — the pitch brought back into vogue by Japanese pitchers — and shattered Kirk’s bat. The ball trickled toward Betts, who scurried over to second, stepped on the bag with his left foot and flipped the ball to Freddie Freeman for the first World Series-ending double play since 1947.
“It’s about betting on players and people,” Roberts said. “There’s this narrative where people think that we’re scripting s— based on numbers, and it couldn’t be further from that. There’s a separation between the regular season, where the numbers make sense, the long view, but then when you’re trying to win 13 games, it’s about players and people and who you’re going to bet on. It’s not all about the matchups.
“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.
Describing the greatest World Series as a “prolonged business trip” encapsulates how Yada sees himself, an ethos he has passed along to Yamamoto. What the Dodgers so adore about Yamamoto is just how normal he is. For all of the novelties of his training, he is a regular dude. He loves his dog. He cracks jokes.
“He’s genuine. He’s responsible. He’s very straightforward,” Yada said. “He doesn’t lose sight of his dreams.”
Dreams are important to Yada, windows into the ethereal place where he believes athletes must go to mine the materials within. In the end, all of the Dodgers unearthed that in a season that started March 18 in Japan and ended just after midnight Nov. 2 in Canada. They won 93 games, cruised through the National League bracket and ran into a Blue Jays unit certain destiny was riding shotgun until its engine faltered. Los Angeles became the first team to win two straight World Series since the New York Yankees triumphed three straight years from 1998-2000. The Dodgers sent Clayton Kershaw, their Hall of Fame ace, into retirement with his third ring and prevented Max Scherzer, Kershaw’s nearest modern analog and Toronto’s Game 7 starter, from winning his third. Los Angeles did it with talent, and with persistence, and with $500 million-plus in salaries and taxes, every dollar spent worth it, particularly the $16 million this year that went to Yamamoto.
“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.
