Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been exactly what the Dodgers needed all season: steady, durable, and just about impossible to take out of the conversation when the rotation gets discussed.
He takes the mound Tuesday night against the Reds in what is expected to be his penultimate regular-season start, and he does it with another heavy workload already banked. Yamamoto has thrown 172 innings, leaving him just five outs from matching his MLB career high from last year.
With two starts remaining, this projects to be his third-highest single-season innings total overall, behind only his 193 2/3 innings in 2021 and 193 innings in 2022 while pitching for Orix in Japan. That stretch helped him win the first two of his three straight Eiji Swamura Awards as Japan’s top pitcher.
He has also been the one constant in a Dodgers rotation that has leaned on him from start to start. Yamamoto is the only Dodgers pitcher to have made every start this season, and unless Justin Wrobleski somehow squeezes 28 2/3 innings into the final 12 games, he’ll again be the club’s only qualifying pitcher - meaning he’d be the only one to reach the innings threshold needed for league leaderboards. Before Yamamoto did it this year and last, the last Dodgers starters to qualify were Julio Urías and Tyler Anderson in 2022.
That kind of durability has been rare in Los Angeles lately, but when it has happened, it has usually come with award recognition. Yamamoto’s 2025 season is the 10th qualifying campaign by a Dodgers pitcher dating back to 2017, and eight of the previous nine qualifying Dodgers pitchers earned Cy Young Award votes that year. The only exception in that span was Tyler Anderson in 2022.
The list of recent qualifiers includes some familiar names: Clayton Kershaw, Hyun-jin Ryu, Walker Buehler, Urías, Anderson, and now Yamamoto. If the pattern holds, Yamamoto should have a strong shot at showing up on ballots again.
And the standard for that is not especially punishing. There are five voting spots on each of the 30 National League ballots, and this year’s field includes Milwaukee Brewers ace Misiorowski, who is a lock for the NL Cy Young Award, along with Chris Sale, Cristopher Sánchez, Jesús Luzardo, and others likely to draw votes.
Even so, simply receiving votes would fit the recent Dodgers trend.
Yamamoto’s profile backs it up. Entering Tuesday, he leads the majors with an average of 6.62 innings per start.
He has 23 outings of at least six innings, which is second-most in MLB, along with 11 starts of at least seven innings, also second-most. His four starts of at least eight innings are tied for the major league lead.
The results are there, too. Yamamoto ranks third in the National League with a 2.62 ERA and a 3.05 xERA.
He is sixth in innings with 172, 10th in strikeouts with 171, and ninth in strikeout-minus-walk rate at 20.1 percent. On the WAR front, he is tied for fourth in Baseball Reference WAR at 5.4 with Sale and tied for fifth in FanGraphs WAR at 4.3 with Reds right-hander Chase Burns.
For the Dodgers, it has been another season with Yamamoto at the center of everything.
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