#yoshinobu-yamamoto

#yoshinobu-yamamoto

Dave Roberts, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has taken great care in these past few years not to act smug or entitled about being the man who guides the best-paid team in American sporting history. That Roberts has more or less pulled it off is one of the great achievements of his stint in that role, but even he cannot hold up the charade any longer.

We're just about a week away from the start of the 2025 MLB playoffs, and that means this year's top contenders are lining up their rotations with hopes of making a deep October run. With that in mind, we decided to rank the starting pitching options for the teams currently in the playoff field with an eye for how they will be used in the postseason.

Right-handed pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto (11-8, 2.72 ERA) is starting for LA, coming off his 8.2 no-hit innings against the Baltimore Orioles in his most recent start before giving up a Jackson Holliday home run in the ninth inning. Opposite Yamamoto will be right-hander Justin Verlander (3-10, 4.09 ERA), who's pitched back-to-back scoreless starts, throwing a total of 11 innings with 16 strikeouts and just six hits allowed.

From the verge of history, to the depths of horror. The kind of unimaginable nightmare even these slumping Dodgers didn't seem capable of. One minute, Yoshinobu Yamamoto was on the precipice of a no-hitter, needing just one out to put his name in the record books. The next, orange Baltimore Orioles jerseys were sprinting around the bases, what had seemed like a storybook night going suddenly wrong.

Dalton Rushing had the biggest hit of the game with a 2-2 tie in the seventh inning. After Andy Pages singled and Michael Conforto walked, Rushing slugged a three-run homer against Jeremiah Estrada to put the Dodgers up 5-2. But that wasn't all the scoring for the Dodgers in that inning, as Mookie Betts also singled and Freddie Freeman blasted his second homer of the game to break the score open to 7-2.

The Dodgers swept the Padres, turning a one game deficit in the West into a two game lead, with starting pitching only allowing three runs in 17 innings.

Yamamoto recorded a microscopic 1.82 ERA over seven seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball, boasting a 4.48 strikeout-to-walk ratio across nearly 900 innings.