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With the hype built up, the priciest pitcher in MLB history finally recorded an official major league start on Thursday.
It was a disaster.
After Tyler Glasnow did the honors in Game 1, it was Yoshinobu Yamamoto's turn to take the hill for the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 2 of the Seoul Series at the Gocheok SkyDome. The hope was that he would throw roughly 90 pitches and go six innings.
Instead, Yamamoto's day was done after a 43-pitch first inning in which the San Diego Padres got to him for five runs. He served up four hits and a walk, with a hit-by-pitch and a wild pitch.
The Dodgers made a valiant effort for a comeback that would have pushed their record to 2-0, but they ultimately remained in the hole Yamamoto dug for them. The Padres won 15-11.
This is not the first impression the Dodgers were hoping for. Between Yamamoto's 12-year, $325 million contract and a $50.6 million posting fee paid to the Orix Buffaloes, they have $375.6 million invested in the 25-year-old from Japan.
But how bad was his major league debut, really? Let's break it down and assign grades.
The Stuff: B
No matter whose scouting report you read in the lead-up to his unveiling, they all pretty much agreed that Yamamoto's stuff—particularly his fastball, curveball and splitter—was legit.
Mercifully, it's still (mostly) possible to have this opinion.
Yamamoto leaned on on his four-seam fastball on Thursday, throwing it 14 times with an average velocity of 95.4 mph and an average spin rate of 2,230 RPM. The former is above-average by 2023 standards, and Yamamoto easily cleared the norm for the latter with a max of 2,394 RPM.
The curveball, meanwhile, averaged 78.6 mph and 2,885 RPM. The second figure would have been in top-10 territory last season, so it's not surprising that the curve functioned as the righty's best pitch in his debut.
The final tally: 10 pitches and four called and swinging strikes, including one by Jackson Merrill that ended the first inning with a strikeout.
Yamamoto's cutter also played a role. He threw it 11 times with averages of 90.9 mph and 2,380 RPM and got two whiffs out of six swings against it.
One of those recorded his first MLB strikeout, courtesy of Jurickson Profar.
Alas, Yamamoto's splitter fell shockingly flat.
It was seen only eight times and didn't draw even a single swing and miss. He did average an impressive 90.3 mph on it, but it was the pitch that accounted for his plunking of Fernando Tatis Jr. and his free pass to Manny Machado, as well as a wild pitch to Profar.
The splitter is a minor disappointment in the scheme of things, but it is still a disappointment nonetheless. It's supposed to be his best pitch, perhaps even on par with that of Shohei Ohtani's. But on Thursday, it landed with a thud.
The Command: F
Command was supposed to be another one of Yamamoto's major selling points.
He averaged 2.0 walks per nine innings in seven seasons in Japan, and just 1.5 per nine innings as he was putting together a sparkling 1.16 ERA for Orix in 2023. He was a strike-thrower, plain and simple.
He was very much not that in his MLB debut. Only 23 of his 43 pitches went for strikes, with only five of the called variety.
It was mostly the off-speed stuff with which Yamamoto was missing the strike zone. That's fine if a pitcher is tunneling or doing something else deliberately meant to get the hitter to expand the zone, but that isn't what Yamamoto was doing. This was him simply not throwing his pitches where he wanted to.
When he did hit the zone, he tended to catch too much of it. That was the case on three of the four hits he gave up, and none as much as on a 1-0 splitter that just sort of hung there for Jake Cronenworth to bash for a two-run triple.
Granted, some grace is warranted here. A major league debut is a nerve-wracking experience under any circ*mstances, and the circ*mstances here aren't ordinary.
Setting aside more general adjustments to life as a major league pitcher—e.g., the pitch timer, a different ball and a different throwing schedule—this particular assignment was a case of Yamamoto leaving spring training early to make a for-real start in a country halfway across the world from where the Dodgers make camp in Arizona.
The Vibes: F
Grace aside, at no point during Yamamoto's debut could anyone sit back and think, "You know, this is going all right."
He was in trouble immediately, with Xander Bogaerts ripping his first pitch through the middle of the infield for a leadoff single. The wheels never really got on from there, and it's not like his command issues were compounded by bad luck.
Save for the grounder down the third-base line that netted Luis Campusano a run-scoring double, the five balls in play off Yamamoto were hit hard. We're talking 100.7 mph in exit velocity on average, with four balls crossing the "hard-hit" threshold of 95 mph.
Further adding to the disappointing nature of Yamamoto's debut is that it was in line with the last two starts he made in the Cactus League. He served up nine runs on 14 hits and four walks over 7.2 innings in those games.
"I'm not a complete pitcher yet," Yamamoto said through an interpreter on March 13. "I'm very happy to start my career in the big leagues."
Yamamoto was bound to go through an adjustment period, so to act like there's any hurry for him to get through it isn't exactly fair. He's only in his mid-20s, and he's on a 12-year contract. The Dodgers are playing the long game with him.
As it is, Yamamoto is already making adjustments. I can't cover those any better than ESPN's Kiley McDaniel, who observed Yamamoto fixing a potential pitch-tipping problem and otherwise making mechanical changes as the spring went along. Given how things went on Thursday, the tinkering is sure to continue.
However, that's as positively as one can spin Yamamoto's major league debut. The Dodgers invested more than $375 million in him because they believe he can be a great MLB pitcher, but that's only in the abstract right now. Based on what we've seen so far, the leap from the abstract to the real could be a big one.
It's also not as if the stakes for the near-term are low.
With Ohtani, Glasnow and a whole bunch of other stars having come aboard alongside Yamamoto over the winter, the Dodgers are the talk of baseball and are supposed to remain that way. The longer Yamamoto needs to figure things out, the greater the threat of the 2024 Dodgers joining the Lakers of 2003-04 and 2012-13 in the Los Angeles annals of disappointing star-studded squads.
Is that jumping to an extreme conclusion? Absolutely. But if ever such a thing is appropriate, it's in the aftermath of an extreme letdown.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.
