by Cary Osborne
When the National League Cy Young Award was announced last week, there was little surprise that Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes won it over Dodger Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Yamamoto finished third behind Skenes and Phillies left-hander Cristopher Sánchez.
The Cy Young Award voting, of course, doesn’t include postseason performance.
But when those are combined, Yamamoto had one of the most dominant single-year performances by a pitcher in Major League history.
Yamamoto is the first Cy Young Award finalist to win the World Series MVP since 2001 co-World Series MVPs Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling.
Yamamoto had a regular-season 2.49 ERA. He had a postseason ERA of 1.45. Three pitchers all time have had a regular-season ERA under 2.50 and qualified for the ERA title and a postseason ERA below 1.50 with at least 30 postseason innings pitched.
Those names are all Dodgers — Yamamoto, Orel Hershiser (in 1988: 2.26 regular season/1.05 postseason ERAs) and Burt Hooton (in 1981: 2.28/0.82 ERAs).
Yamamoto is one of five pitchers in postseason history to win five games. He joined Randy Johnson (2001), Francisco Rodriguez (2002), Stephen Strasburg (2019) and Nathan Eovaldi (2023) as members of the exclusive five-win club.
The right-handed starter became the 20th pitcher in MLB history to have a regular-season ERA of 2.50 or better, at least 200 strikeouts and average fewer than 6.0 hits per nine innings.
He had the lowest starting pitcher opponents’ batting average (.183) in the regular season. It was the lowest by a Dodger starting pitcher since Hideo Nomo in 1995 (.182). It’s the third-lowest in franchise history. Sandy Koufax’s .179 OPPBA in 1965 is the Dodger record.
Yamamoto also limited opponents to the lowest slugging percentage (.283) and OPS (.539) in the Majors.
Combined, regular and postseason, his numbers look like this: 36 games (35 starts), 211 innings, 17–9 record, 2.30 ERA, 0.95 WHIP, 234 strikeouts, .181 opponents’ batting average, .278 opponents’ slugging percentage and .528 OPS.
An appreciation of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s entire 2025 season was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.