When Yoshinobu Yamamoto arrived in Glendale, Arizona, for his first spring training with the Dodgers, fresh off signing the largest free-agent contract for a pitcher in MLB history, his new team quickly realized a minor problem.
The issue was not with Yamamoto himself — the then-25-year-old hurler was as good and as generationally talented as advertised — but with his interpreter, Yoshihiro “Hiro” Sonoda.
Most dedicated Asian-language interpreters in MLB have a baseball background. Giants slugger Jung Hoo-Lee’s interpreter, Justin Han, worked for a team in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) interpreting for the handful of American players making the cross-Pacific leap. Chicago Cubs All-Star Shota Imanaga has Edwin Stanberry, who played at the Division II level and spent a year playing independent ball. Tomoyuki Sugano’s guy, Yuto Sakurai, worked in baseball operations for the Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants before joining the Orioles.
But Sonoda was a very different story. He had no significant experience in baseball. The listed job history on what appears to be his Linkedin page is oddly scarce and includes only one other vaguely described occupation: “Film Lighting.” The specifics of Sonoda’s hiring — organized by Yamamoto’s agency, not the Dodgers — are hazy, but a story from Sonoda’s alma mater stated that he received the job after an open search.
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Whatever the circumstances, Sonoda’s lack of baseball background posed an interesting challenge for the Dodgers’ player development group: How could they convey complex concepts to their $325 million player if the linguistic bridge between the two parties was unfamiliar with the very concepts that needed to be conveyed?
“You’re going through two people,” Dodgers coach Chris Woodward explained to Yahoo Sports. “So the interpreter has got to know just as much as the player, or the interpreter might misinterpret what you’re saying.”
The solution? Baseball boot camp.
All throughout that spring training, the Dodgers’ battalion of ball-knowers put Sonoda through a hardball crash course. Pitching coaches Connor McGuiness and Mark Prior, alongside director of pitching Rob Hill, inundated the intelligent but unprepared former lighting engineer with the intricacies of the sport that now dominated his waking hours.
“We kind of flooded him with a ton of information,” McGuiness told Yahoo Sports back in May. “Starting very basic level, all the way up to pitch data, classifications, getting him the Driveline [certification]. Making him follow [media members] so he can hear basic terminology. We got him to follow Pitching Ninja on Twitter and Lance [Brozdowski] and all these guys that are talking about this stuff. It’s just like, ‘Hey, when you’re taking a dump, like, sit there and watch. How do they talk? What are the words they’re using?’”
Slowly but surely, Sonoda sponged up the material.
That story is but one example of how the Dodgers have crafted an infrastructure that helps Japanese players dealing with significant cultural and linguistic barriers get the most out of their abilities.
The presence of Will Ireton, who serves as the primary interpreter for the other two Japanese Dodgers, two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani and rookie flame-thrower Roki Sasaki, also played a massive role in helping Sonoda and Yamamoto get up to speed.
Ireton joined the Dodgers organization in 2016 as the interpreter for pitcher Kenta Maeda, and he moved into baseball operations in February 2019. He remained behind the scenes in a variety of positions until the start of the 2024 season, when it was discovered that Ohtani’s former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, had stolen nearly $17 million from the superstar. Since then, Ireton has become best known as the English-speaking world’s conduit to the game’s most important player, but he shoulders numerous other responsibilities as the team’s “director of Japanese player operations and strategy.”
“Honestly, it’s been incredibly helpful to have a guy like Will Ireton around, who’s kind of done all of it,” McGuiness said.
Ireton, effectively, is fluent in three languages: English, Japanese and baseball. That’s why he always accompanies Prior during in-game mound visits with Ohtani, Sasaki and Yamamoto. He’s typically present whenever any of that trio throws bullpens or flatgrounds before games to help ensure that pitch-data information gets relayed effectively. Ireton wears a multitude of hats for the Dodgers: confidante, media consultant, cultural liaison, player development analyst and, of course, interpreter. He has played a significant role in many of the franchise’s maneuvers in the Japanese market, from the onboarding of Ohtani to the recruitment of Sasaki.
Will Ireton (far left), the Dodgers’ director of Japanese player operations and strategy, has been instrumental in helping Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki thrive in L.A. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
(Harry How via Getty Images)
Ohtani, now in his eighth big-league season, has grown less dependent on Ireton when it comes to interacting with teammates and coaches. Yamamoto, whose sister is an English teacher in Japan, is somewhere in the middle, while Sasaki, still a rookie, remains more reliant on an interpreter.
Communication has been particularly important with the 23-year-old Sasaki, who, given his age, was much less of a finished product than most of his countrymen when making the leap to MLB. Overflowing with talent, Sasaki underperformed in his final two years in NPB. During his free-agent sweepstakes, he specifically asked interested clubs how they intended to help him recapture his fastball velocity. The Dodgers and their renowned player development apparatus, unsurprisingly, made a strong pitch.
Still, it took some time for Sasaki to build trust in his new employer. The tumultuous nature of his rookie season, which saw him hit the injured list in May due to a shoulder issue, further complicated matters. But L.A.’s pitching group was intentional about taking a relatively hands-off approach with their new phenom during the first chunk of this year. It is, after all, easier to implement mechanical, strategic changes if the player first experiences failure his own way.
“Any new player that you acquire, it takes a little while to build up trust. We didn’t try to push it too early,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman told The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya about Sasaki. “We knew that he was a guy that was accustomed to doing things a certain way, and we were going to embrace that.”
Through the process, the Dodgers trusted their infrastructure — specifically, their ability to navigate a cultural and language barrier to help a pitcher improve. It was something they had accomplished successfully the year prior with Yamamoto, helping him overcome a relatively underwhelming first half during his debut campaign in 2024. And this year, the club also deftly steered Ohtani back to being the frontline arm he’d been in Anaheim for so many years.
So when Sasaki, after a handful of poor Triple-A outings in late August and early September, approached the Dodgers looking for help, the team was willing and able. A week of introspection and video review at the team’s spring training facility with Hill, the pitching director, led to a key mechanical adjustment that unlocked Sasaki’s lost velocity and led to his shocking ascension into a playoff game-changer for Los Angeles’ undermanned bullpen.
“The goal was to come back fully healthy and just fully ready to pitch again,” Sasaki told reporters via an interpreter during the NLDS. “I was cognizant that there could be that possibility that I may not pitch in the regular season again. There’s been a lot of support staff, coaching staff, the people around me who helped me get to where I am today. So, yes, very grateful for that.”
Although Sasaki struggled in NLCS Game 1 against Milwaukee, his overall postseason numbers are fabulous: 7 innings, 1 earned run, 2 hits, 6 strikeouts and, most importantly, just 2 walks. Meanwhile, Yamamoto, who was an All-Star this season, looks like one of the best pitchers on the planet, fresh off the first complete game in the MLB postseason since 2017. And Ohtani, once again fully healthy and overpowering on the mound, has a chance to pitch the Dodgers to an NLCS sweep in Game 4 on Friday at Dodger Stadium.
It’s all a testament to the juggernaut the Dodgers have built.
Yes, the bottomless cache of money helps, but this organization also deserves credit for its ability to get the most out of the players it recruits. The Dodgers are intentional about the environment they foster for their Japanese players, both in the locker room and in their relationships with coaches. After all, Los Angeles’ well-renowned coaches are only as good as their ability to communicate. That’s the secret sauce. So much of coaching and player development is meeting the players — and their interpreters — where they are.
Even if that place is on the toilet.
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