Japan is in LA

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The 2025 MLB season concluded yesterday and the Dodgers reigned supreme yet again.

They have played in 4 championships since 2018 and won 3 of them!1

What a surprise! They were only the betting favorites by a 2x margin heading into the season.

The best player of all time (Shohei Ohtani, have you heard of him?) plays for them and he wasn’t even their best player from Japan this series.

Why is Shohei Ohtani the talk of the town?

Shohei Ohtani is a superhero. If a movie about him came out 10 years ago, people would have labeled it as fiction.

Introducing Yoshinobu Yamamoto

Without having thrown a pitch in the MLB, Yoshinobu Yamamoto became the highest paid pitcher OF ALL TIME2. Some former players questioned the decision; they were wrong.

He threw two complete games in the postseason, struck out a million people, and gave up like negative 5 runs, or at least that’s what it felt like.

Okay so he did well, but better than Shohei? No way!

Yes. Now instead of talking about this in terms of championship win probability added, I’m gonna explain it in NBA terms, per a friend’s request.

A Thought Exercise

Imagine if the following NBA players were one:

  • 2013 Lebron James
  • 1996 Michael Jordan
  • 2016 Stephen Curry
  • 2000 Shaquille O’Neal

That’s Shohei Ohtani.

In all seriousness, this playoff run by Yoshinobu Yamamoto was crazy. I’m going to try my best, but pitching is pretty difficult to compare to other sports because of the physical restraints that are “placed” on starting pitchers, preventing them from playing in consecutive games. I say “placed” because Yamamoto essentially voided them.

He started 2 of the 7 games in the World Series (the Dodgers won both). Threw 96 pitches in game 6, followed by the last 33 innings of game 7! That’s some crazy stuff4.

So here it is, here is my “Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s World Series in NBA Terms”.

A Real Thought Exercise

Imagine the 2019 Finals (multiple stars, California vs Toronto, it all makes sense). Shohei is Steph, Yoshi is KD. In the actual series, KD ruptured his Achilles in game 5 and missed the rest of the games, but in my made up scenario, the injury was less severe. For the sake of adding physical constraints, let’s say a grade 2 ankle sprain. KD suffers an ankle sprain but decides to play in game 6 (30 pts), and then hits the game-winning free throws in game 7.

GOAT stuff from Yoshinobu, the second-best Japanese player on the LA Dodgers.

  1. They never had a chance in 2018. That Red Sox team is one of the best collections of talent that the MLB has ever seen (some slight bias here). ↩︎

  2. 12yrs/$325M. With that kind of money I could buy the gustavo.sh domain. ↩︎

  3. Technically two and two-thirds innings, but I didn’t care to explain that. ↩︎

  4. 2014 Madison Bumgarner did something similar (maybe even better?!) but that is a different discussion. ↩︎