Yoshinobu Yamamoto is reportedly headed to the World Baseball Classic, and the Los Angeles Dodgers might want to keep the Tums next to the trophy case. He’s coming off 211 innings pitched in 2025, the heaviest workload of his professional life and well past the 193 innings he ever reached in Japan.
That’s a big jump for any ace, and now he’s tacking on competitive WBC innings before the Dodgers even get him back into their spring program.
For a normal team, it’s something to monitor.
For a club trying to pull off a three-peat, it’s a legitimate concern. Not only that, the Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani expected to play for Japan in the WBC as well.
The Dodgers built their recent run on depth, planning, and refusing to overexpose their stars. Yamamoto changes that a little. He wasn’t just good in 2025; he was a workhorse in a rotation that needed him, carrying them through the regular season and then taking on high-leverage work during the postseason push. That adds extra stress; the innings column doesn’t fully show.
That’s why the WBC complicates things.
Spring training is normally where the Dodgers script every bullpen session, velocity checkpoint, rest day, and pitch-count climb. The WBC laughs politely at that structure. If Yamamoto is throwing meaningful innings for Japan in March, he’s essentially speeding up a build that the Dodgers would prefer to slow down.
The risk isn’t immediate injury, because the Dodgers are too smart to let that happen. But early-season fatigue is a real worry.
They may have to push back his first turn, shorten outings in April, or skip a start or two to keep him fresh for the long haul. And in a year where they’re trying to chase history, the margin for error tightens. A tired ace in April often becomes a taxed bullpen in July and a thin rotation in September.
Los Angeles still expects Yamamoto to be an ace. Nothing about the WBC changes that. But for a team trying to do something only dynasties dream about, the extra mileage on their most reliable arm becomes part of the equation, whether they want it to be or not.
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