Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto has a good shot at the Cy Young Award

PHOENIX — Baby is back.

Pocket World Series hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto has returned to the Dodgers with a substantial back end that has been sculpted over the winter to withstand what promises to be a demanding year, including the World Baseball Classic.

Everything about the 6-foot-1 right-hander looks stronger, from his chest to his shoulders to his lower body – especially the backside.

Yamamoto said he had gained weight, but declined to reveal how much.

“A little,” he said in Japanese.

Yamamoto smiled and made a completely unnecessary clarification: “It is not due to a weakening of the mind.”

No kidding.

Yamamoto looks like a boulder. He looks like a small tank. It appears he will be this year’s National League Cy Young Award winner.

If resilience was his biggest obstacle to becoming Japan’s first pitcher to win the award, he addressed it.

A year after admitting he was “very interested” in the Cy Young Award, Yamamoto said of baseball’s biggest pitching honor: “I think it’s a great award, record. I would like to be able to pitch in a way that would make me so appreciated.”

A day earlier, Shohei Ohtani also said he wanted to win the prize.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts chuckled when asked who his money was on.

“I’m not going to say that,” Roberts said.

Based on what the 27-year-old Yamamoto did last year, he thinks he is the safer choice of the two Japanese top players. He was the team’s only pitcher, regardless of nationality, to remain in the rotation throughout the regular season. An All-Star selection, he was 12-8 with a 2.49 ERA in a team-high 30 starts.

The playoffs elevated him even more. He threw a complete game against the Brewers in the NL Championship Series. He threw another against the Blue Jays in the World Series. When the Dodgers ran out of pitchers two days later, he offered to pitch and even went so far as to warm up in the bullpen before Freddie Freeman closed the game with an 18th inning home run. Yamamoto won his Game 6 start. The next day he returned to pitch the final 2 ⅔ innings in a Game 7 victory.

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His efforts made him the World Series MVP.

No matter how many times he pitched in October, Yamamoto said he didn’t feel more exhausted than usual. He said he felt better.

“To be honest, the level of fatigue on my body was not as bad as in recent years,” Yamamoto said. “When I started exercising after a month of rest, the feeling and condition of my body was much better than normal.”

When he returned to work, he did so again under the tutelage of his old trainer, Osamu Yada. After his start in Game 6 of the World Series, it was Yada who advised him to prepare his body to at least be able to throw into the bullpen the next day. Yada convinced him that his presence in the bullpen would give the Dodgers a psychological advantage over the Blue Jays.

“That’s how I got fooled,” said Yamamoto, who ultimately gave the Dodgers more than just a mental advantage.

Yada’s training program for Yamamoto is unusual and consists of handstands, swingarms and javelin throwing. The trainer makes adjustments every year based on what he thinks Yamamoto needs. This winter he wanted Yamamoto to add some volume. With Yada by his side, Yamamoto trained six days a week.

The pitcher has a demanding year ahead of him, but he said he wasn’t worried about the potential workload.

At the end of this month, Yamamoto will join the Japanese national team for its WBC training camp. He is expected to be the team’s No. 1 starter in the tournament.

In the months that follow, he will lead the Dodgers’ rotation, this time avoiding the midseason slump that removed him from Cy Young contention last year.

These are opportunities for Yamamoto to further elevate himself. As it is, he was already named the best pitcher in the world by Ohtani when the Dodgers won the World Series last year. When Yamamoto gave live batting practice on Friday, Ohtani and Roki Sasaki watched him from behind home plate in the seiza kneeling position, with their lower legs under their hamstrings. The traditional Japanese way of kneeling is meant to convey respect. In this case, Ohtani and Sasaki were making fun of Yamamoto, but the premise of their joke was that Yamamoto was a great pitcher.

Now that he’s literally bigger, Yamamoto could be on his way to getting bigger figuratively. This time next year, the opinion Ohtani shared about Yamamoto’s place in the game could be the consensus.