LOS ANGELES — Yoshinobu Yamamoto did not just show up in Los Angeles throwing 97 with a disappearing splitter and a body that somehow survives workloads that would fry most pitchers. The Dodgers’ World Series MVP arrived with a secret weapon from Osaka, a 60-something judo therapist and movement nerd named Osamu Yada. If you watched Game 7 and saw Yamamoto trot out a day after throwing 96 pitches, you also saw Yada’s life’s work on display. Yamamoto kept saying he was grateful. He meant grateful to the man who rebuilt him.
The origin story is very Japanese baseball: a skinny fourth-round pick gets sent to a specialist because people around him figure he’ll need help to survive pro ball. Number Web tells it plainly. When Yada first met Yamamoto, he said the pitcher looked like “a kid from a fishing town, pure, calm, with a little mischief showing.” Then Yada told the teenager something almost rude for a new pro to hear: “Even if you train without sleep, you can’t get where you want to go with the way you’re throwing now. You need a full model change.” Yamamoto answered, “Then I’ll do that.” That’s the relationship right there. The mentor says it has to change. The pupil says OK.
From that point, everything about Yamamoto’s development ran through Yada. The Los Angeles Times later reported that the unorthodox drills, the unique arm action, the slide step, even the willingness to change after good seasons all trace back to this one trainer who works outside the normal NPB system. Coaches for the Orix Buffaloes (Yama’s NPB team) were surprised a young pitcher would overhaul his delivery after success. Yamamoto did it anyway because Yada had mapped out the path. “He’s never satisfied,” one Orix teammate said at the time, and Yada was the one feeding that hunger.
In 1980, while he was still in his early twenties, Yada opened the Yada Osteopathic Clinic. From there he built his own techniques, focusing on the body’s natural functions. In 1988 he founded the Kinetic Forum and started teaching therapists, trainers, and athletes. In 1996 he launched an NPO for sports and health support and has been involved in social contribution and training young people ever since. Many people around Japan have learned from him, including pro baseball players.
Former Dodger Yoshitomo Tsutsugo studied with Yada from junior high. Tsutsugo said that after hearing Yada’s ideas he started to take a more self-directed approach to playing, which helped him mentally too. He said, “You grow your own body, so you also take responsibility for it.” That shows part of Yada’s philosophy: it’s not just teaching techniques, it’s developing the athlete’s own ability to sense and act.
What makes Yada different? ESPN’s long World Series piece let him explain it himself. “Think about a tree,” he said. The sports world, he thinks, tells people to move hands and feet, to adjust the branches. He wanted to build the trunk so it never snaps. He talked about using 600 muscles at 10 percent instead of one muscle at 100. He talked about nature and Eastern philosophy and keeping an eye on the whole instead of drilling one tiny thing. That’s the guy who built the pitcher the Dodgers just rode to a second straight title.
If that sounds airy, the Japanese coverage of Game 7 anchored it in real work. Nikkan Sports wrote that after Yamamoto threw in Game 6, he actually told Yada, “Thank you for the year,” because he thought he was done. Yada told him, “Let’s get you to where you can at least throw in the bullpen tomorrow.” Yamamoto went back for treatment that night, got checked again at the hotel the next morning, threw, felt good, and by nightfall he was on the mound in Toronto getting the final outs of the World Series. Afterward he said, “Just showing him me throwing in the bullpen changed the air. I’m really thankful.” That is not normal trainer-player stuff. That is trust.
“When I was 19,” Yamamoto explained, “I’d pitch in a meaningless game and then I couldn’t throw for 10 days. But after years of training, now I can pitch two days after starting in the World Series. That shows how much I’ve grown, and how great Mr. Yada is.”
He said Yada would tell him, “It’s not good enough if you can pitch five innings in a meaningless game and then be dead the next day. You have to be able to pitch the next day too.”
Yada’s own comments after the game were funny and warm. “I’m already over 60, so he listens to me. I’m grateful. He’s like a very good grandson,” he told Nikkan. Then he said something every Dodger fan should frame: “From normal training theory, it’s hard to imagine, but today he was in better condition than yesterday.” He was basically saying, I know this shouldn’t work, but with his mindset it did. That is the man the Dodgers quietly allowed to keep working on their $325 million pitcher.
American front-office people needed convincing too. Both ESPN and RealGM noted that Dodgers scouts and executives actually went to Osaka in 2023 to watch Yada’s tiny two-story clinic, the one that calls itself “Japan’s No. 1 Spiritual and Physical Strength Shop.” They saw people doing handstands, throwing mini-soccer balls, launching a featherweight javelin that wobbles if your sequencing is off. Andrew Friedman eventually saw it for himself, and when Yamamoto said he was ready to go on zero rest in 2025, Yada texted through the interpreter that his stuff would be the same. Then it was the same.
The best line in all the English-language reporting came from Yamamoto himself. RealGM quoted him saying about Yada: “He’s the person who built me.” That’s as clean as it gets. You can hear the Japanese version in the Nikkan piece too, where Yamamoto remembered meeting him and thinking, “If I learn from this person, I can throw amazing pitches.” It’s the same idea, just said eight years apart: this is the guy.
Japanese outlets have been spelling out the nuts and bolts for a while: Yada’s training starts with standing correctly. It digs into deep muscles that you can’t power through. It includes roughly 400 “BC exercises” that look boring on video but teach the body to move as one. Later come the viral clips Dodgers fans saw in spring: the handstands, the bridge, the javelin throw that explains his arm path and balance. Yamamoto himself has used phrases like “finding a form that lets me throw a really hard ball without putting in strength.” That’s pure Yada.
And when the Dodgers finally met the man, he made it accessible. ESPN said Yada told club employees in 2024 to think of Yamamoto like the anime characters Goku or One-Punch Man, someone always searching for the next level. He called himself “a loudmouth grandpa.” That’s probably why a 27-year-old MLB star still lets him poke, stretch, and tell him what to do. It’s also why, on the night the Dodgers needed someone to follow Shohei Ohtani and a patched-together bullpen (which was mostly starters to be honest), Yamamoto felt nothing but confidence walking in from the pen. He knew the man who built him had said he was good to go.
So if you’re writing the story of 2025 and it starts with Ohtani’s heroics and Miguel Rojas‘s unlikely homer and Will Smith‘s game-winner and Dave Roberts‘ roster moves, save a paragraph for the older gentleman from Osaka with the bag full of weighted javelins. He is the through line from teenage Orix prospect to $325 million signee to World Series hero on no rest. Yamamoto trusted him when he was 18. The Dodgers trusted him when they were about to sign a franchise-altering contract. And on the night that banner got secured, Yada was right there while his “grandson” finished the job.
But don’t assume that Yada-sensei thinks his work is done. He and Yamamoto are still tinkering, still working around the edges, still pursuing perfection. “His fastball at the bottom of the zone is getting better,” Yada explained. “He’s still developing. Next season he’ll probably complete a pitch that will make everyone go, ‘Wow.’”
We can’t wait.
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