After seven games, plenty of extra innings, and a history-making pitching turn, the first repeat champions of this century could finally exhale.
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.
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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.
