Hi friends-
Some housekeeping:
As a reminder we will discuss our February book club book K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches by Tyler Kepner in the Substack chat app beginning this Sunday, March 3rd at 10 AM PT. We will also talk about it over zoom with Tyler from 5:30 PM PT - 6:30 PM PT on Monday, March 4th. Both the chat and the zoom are open to all paid subscribers. If you are a paid subscriber you don’t have to RSVP: you will automatically be sent links to both events. If you haven’t already, you can upgrade to become a paid subscriber and win my undying affection here: <3
I sent out a link to the podcast I did with Joe Posnanski yesterday where we talked about all the baseball news of the week. If you missed it, you can find it here. Joe and I hope to do weekly podcasts this month, and they will be free for all readers.
We’ve got a lot to get to today, so let’s dive in by talking about what I think has been the least covered major story in MLB so far this spring: Yoshinobu Yamamoto is an absolute freak. He is not only the favorite to win the NL Rookie of the Year in 2024, but I think he will be a Cy Young threat as well.
I realize my Yamamoto take might not be scorching hot. After all, the Dodgers did give the 25-year-old Japanese righty an eye-watering 12-year, $325 million deal in December. They would not have given him Gerrit Cole money if they thought he profiled as a number three starter. They clearly view Yamamoto not only as an ace, but as a number one with a bullet.
I had no reason to doubt their assessment of his value. MLB teams now have more data than ever about Japanese ballplayers, and NPB stars have proven that they can dominate here, too. (Just look at Shohei Ohtani and Kodai Senga, who were both hyped out of Japan but still shattered expectations here in the U.S.).
Wednesday marked the first time any of us got to see Yamamoto pitch to a major league baseball team. It’s spring training, of course, so I’m offering the play-by-play with several grains of salt. Yes, he faced the defending World champion Texas Rangers for two innings. Yes he punched out Marcus Semien, Nathaniel Lowe, and Leody Taveras—with Lowe and Taveras looking especially bamboozled.
He tossed two scoreless frames and faced the minimum six hitters after an Evan Carter single was erased by a Wyatt Langford GIDP.
But again, this is only spring training. The Rangers best hitter, Corey Seager, is out with a sports hernia, and every slugger in Florida and Texas is spending this week flicking cobwebs off their bats. Two clean innings with three K’s on February 28th is nothing to write a newsletter about.
Reader, I am writing about this guy’s stuff is filthier than a 19-year-old male’s dorm room late second semester.
Lance Brozdowski is a player development analyst for Marquee Sports Network. Before that, he was a video editor for Driveline Baseball, the data-driven training center that specializes in, among other things, helping pitchers get extra ounces of velocity, spin, and break to get better. His job is to track infinitesimal movement on pitches MLB players throw. Here is his report on what came out of Yamamoto’s right hand in his first spring training start.
(4S= Four-seam fastball. SPL 1 = split fingered fastball. SPL 2 = his second split fingered fastball. CU= curveball. CT= cut fastball).
I texted this screen shot to a pitching coach of an NL rival, who did a double-take. “91 split Is unhittable,” he wrote back. I hadn’t considered that, so I went to the data. He’s right!
Here is a complete list of every pitcher in MLB who threw a split fingered fastball that topped 90.6 MPH last year:
All three players are relievers. Batters are just not used to seeing splitters coming in that hot, especially from starting pitchers. It’s a pitch that isn’t really en vogue in the U.S. right now, and maybe Tyler Kepner can help explain why during our book club Zoom on Monday. It’s a popular pitch in Japan, however, and both Ohtani, and Yu Darvish all throw it— though not as hard. (Ohtani’s sits at 88, Darvish’s at 89).
Yamamoto’s cut fastball is also special. Getting 2.5 inches of cut on a 92.5 mph fastball is obscene for a starting pitcher. Most big league cutters get between 0-1 inch of sweep. Only 14 players threw a cutter last year that averaged 92.5 mph or better. And of that number, only three were starters. Dustin May’s averaged 93 mph, but got just 0.5 inches of sweep. Gerrit Cole’s cutter averaged 92.7 mph and got 2.7 inches. Corbin Burnes led the way with a 94.4 mph cut fastball with 3.1 inches of sweep.
So basically, if Yamamoto’s outing on Wednesday is a true indication of his stuff, then he’s got the best splitter of any starting pitcher in MLB and he’s tied with Gerrit Cole for the second-best cutter.
And we haven’t even gotten to Yamamoto’s rainbow curveball, which might be his best pitch:
As you can see, the batter flailed at the curve, then fell on his butt and watched his soul leave his body.
Yamamoto’s fastball is also different, in that the 8 inches of horizontal run gets on the hands of right-handed batters quick.
This is..uh…video game baseball.
Yes, it was one start. Yes, it was two innings. But with this data we now have a better understanding of why the Dodgers gave him the largest pitching contract in MLB history. Yoshinobu Yamamoto looks like he’s going to be an absolute monster. Plan your lives accordingly!
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UNIFORM FIASCO UPDATE:
Billionaire Fanatics owner Michael Rubin is big mad that everyone is blaming his goblin-eqsue company over the new MLB uniforms looking and feeling like they are made of 1-ply toilet paper. Per Stephen J. Nesbitt and Evan Drellich at The Athletic, Rubin showed up to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and whined that the entire mess is Nike’s fault. “We’ve purely been doing exactly as we’re told — we’ve been told we’ve done everything exactly right — and we’re getting the shit kicked out of ourselves every day right now,” Rubin said. “That’s not fun.”
You know what else is not fun, Mr. Rubin? Fans paying $400 for an authentic player jersey that looks cheaper than a shirsey I can get off a Big 5 clearance rack. While I understand that Nike should catch most of the heat for designing the ugly, cheap, and see-through gear that players are forced to wear right now, Rubin seems to be conveniently obfuscating the fact that his company is the one gouging fans who want to buy their favorite player’s jerseys—which is why the unwashed masses who made him a billionaire are so mad!
Here’s what I would have asked Rubin: When Nike lowered the quality of the lighter-weight jerseys and did away with the embroidered numbers and letters on most of them, did they force you to continue charging fans the equivalent of a new car payment for them? Rubin is worth an estimated $11.5 billion. The profit margins on his company’s poor quality products must be better than ever. He’s built his empire kicking the sh-t out of fans, and now it looks like they’re finally kicking back.
WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENT
Shohei Ohtani hard-launched his marriage late Wednesday night, posting to his Instagram page that he not only has a girlfriend (Page 1 news in Japan!), but that he married her. He broke the news near midnight from Phoenix, ostensibly so it would be courteously teed up for primetime evening news programs in Japan.
Because I am a history dork, I instantly thought of England’s comatose King George V being given fatal doses of cocaine and morphine at 11 pm back in 1936 so that the news of his passing would be broken by the morning papers rather than the “less appropriate evening journals.”
I don’t mean to compare marriage to death by lethal injection, but since Ohtani is both the king of Japan and of American baseball, it makes sense that every major life announcement be carefully orchestrated with military precision. Even though Ohtani is an extremely private person he is still a millennial after all, which means he will probably keep breaking major life events on Instagram.
Anyway, congratulations to Shohei and his bride, whose identity we may never learn.
That’s all for this week! You can find me on Bluesky at @mollyknight, or on Instagram and Threads at @molly_knight.
When you consider who got the throne when George V died ....
By the way, did you see that Yamamoto said Ohtani called his outing, "So-so." This is going to be FUN!
Not to mention Yamamoto threw nothing but strikes.