For a couple moments Tuesday afternoon, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts spit out a rapid-fire version of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s biography, or at least his Baseball Reference page.
World Series winner? Check. World Baseball Classic winner? Olympic Games gold medalist? Check. Sawamura Award winner, presented annually to Japan’s best pitcher? Check.
Cy Young award winner? No.
Or, at least, not yet.
The Dodgers have won 12 Cy Young awards, the most of any major league team, with franchise icons including Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser and Clayton Kershaw bringing home the hardware. Yamamoto has the talent to win.
Is it in their best interest if he does? Or could the numbers he might need to put up to win the award be counterproductive to the Dodgers winning another World Series?
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In this century, only two players have won a Cy Young award and a World Series championship in the same season: Randy Johnson, with the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks, and Justin Verlander, with the 2022 Houston Astros.
The Dodgers include October on their schedule every year. Their regular season consists of priming pitchers for October, not padding their resumes for awards.
No Dodgers pitcher has thrown 200 innings or won 20 games over the past four years, the last two of which have ended with parades. If the Dodgers choose not to mess with team success, they would not afford Yamamoto the chance to hit either of those traditional barometers of excellence.
The last time a Dodgers pitcher won a Cy Young in a year in which the team won the World Series: Hershiser, in 1988. He threw 267 innings that season, then another 42⅔ in the playoffs. The Dodgers are as likely to let Yamamoto throw that much as they are to let him bat cleanup.
“I think he could throw more, but I don’t think he needs to,” Hershiser said. “Every organization is different.
“If Yamamoto was on a .500 club that was hoping to get a wild card, they wouldn’t be planning for October every year like the Dodgers. They would be pitching him more.”
Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto prepares to deliver in the first inning of a 4-1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday night at Rogers Centre. (Cole Burston / Getty Images)
Roberts said he did not believe that whatever restraints the Dodgers might put on Yamamoto would spoil his chances for the Cy Young award, if his performance otherwise warrants it. The game has changed, and with it the award voting.
Of the 10 Cy Young winners over the past five years, eight did not throw 200 innings. None won 20 games.
Yamamoto has pitched six innings in each of his first three starts, including Tuesday’s 4-1 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays. He averaged 5.8 innings per start last season, when he pitched 173⅔ innings.
Is a seven-inning pitcher beyond where he is, or where the game is today?
“I purposefully took him out of a lot of games where he had six innings, and I could have pushed him, and I don’t know how it would have played out,” Roberts said before the game. “But there’s a lot of intentionality to kind of banking what you have with him. But could he be? I don’t see why he couldn’t.
“I think he would certainly argue that I’ve probably taken him out too soon at times.”
If Yamamoto is the Dodgers’ best pitcher, then every inning he pitches is an inning that gives the Dodgers their best chance to win. There is no need to extend him beyond his comfort zone, but he pitched 193 innings twice in Japan, averaging 7.4 innings per start. He should be able to handle 200 innings.
“It’s certainly possible,” Roberts said, “but I’m just not going to manage to get him to reach a certain milestone. How he’s pitching in a certain game, to then go to the next game and how it looks, that’s kind of how I do it.”
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Yamamoto started 30 games last season. One more inning in each start would have gotten him to 200 innings.
To his credit, Roberts did not take him out after six innings Tuesday. Yamamoto started the seventh inning and faced two batters — the first doubled after an ABS review nullified a strikeout, the second dropped a bunt single — then left after 97 pitches. Alex Vesia, Blake Treinen and Edwin Díaz collected the final nine outs.
That, too, is a plan. Handing the ball to an ace like Yamamoto and asking for nine innings is ancient history.
“You have bullpens that are a lot richer and deeper,” Hershiser said. “You’ve got quality arms in the bullpens, where ballclubs are spending money.
“As far as the workload in the playoffs compared to what they’re doing in the regular season, I think they all could still do what we did. I just think they’re not being trained or asked to do it. I just think it’s a different time and a different culture.
“He’s able to do it. I think (Shohei) Ohtani is able to do it. I think (Blake) Snell is able to do it. I think (Tyler) Glasnow is able to do it. But there is a different way to spend your assets now.”
Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitches against the Arizona Diamondbacks on March 26 at Dodger Stadium. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
The concept that a team would give a pitcher an extra start or two to make his case for an award? Not this team, anyway.
“Now they’re saving those 10 or 20 innings for the playoffs,” Hershiser said.
“I think our guys have a chance to win a Cy Young even pitching once a week, if that’s what they ask them to do, until the games mean something more. Then they might bring them back on no days rest, as they have.”
That was a wink and a nod toward Yamamoto, who has won his last four appearances here: Game 2 of the World Series on 10 days rest; Game 6 on five days rest; Game 7 on no days rest, and Tuesday on five days rest.
The Dodgers have made clear that saving an inning for the postseason is preferable to spending it during the regular season. For a pitcher under contract to the Dodgers through 2035, it is certainly defensible in the short and the long term.
But, for a coaching staff and front office that loves the phrase “gives us our best chance to win,” a little more of Yamamoto could do just that.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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