This happened over time, but a rarely think about complete games anymore as a possibility, due to their rarity. There were only 29 of them during the MLB regular season this year, roughly one every 168 games or so, a little less than one per team.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto has pitched two of them in a row, and in the playoffs no less. In the World Series, even! The first complete game in the Fall Classic since Johnny Cueto for the Kansas City Royals in Game 2 in 2015.
When Yamamoto needed 23 pitches to get through the first inning, I was thinking more about how the Dodgers might be headed for a repeat of Game 1, with a starter needing to exit earlier than planned and the Blue Jays feasting on the bullpen. A complete game was not on my radar for Game 2, and I wasn’t alone.
“After that first inning, I was thinking six. I felt he would find a way to get through six. It’s an aggressive swinging team. I thought the stuff was good, so I felt that he could manage to get through six,” manager Dave Roberts told reporters in Toronto. “Then the pitch count kind of stayed where it needed to stay. And then for me, I just didn’t see anything fall off as far as his delivery and the execution.”
“To be honest, I was not thinking I can complete the game because my pitch count racked up kind of quickly,” Yamamoto said, through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda. “But I’m very happy I completed the game.”
Yamamoto pitched 12 complete games over his final three seasons with the Orix Blue Wave in Japan (2021-23), when he won the Eiji Sawamura Award as the top starting pitcher in Japan three years in a row. He nearly had a complete game on September 6 in Baltimore, coming to within one out of a no-hitter. The Dodgers bullpen stunningly lost that game, though a team meeting earlier that day has been talked about by several Dodgers since as helping the team find clarity down the stretch.
After the loss in Yamamoto’s near no-hitter, the Dodgers are 25-7.
Complete games are rare, but consecutive complete games are a needle in a haystack. It’s not just that Yamamoto is the first pitcher with complete games in back-to-back postseason starts since Curt Schilling in 2001. No pitcher has even done that in the regular season since Corey Kluber for Cleveland in 2017. Before Yamamoto, the last Dodgers pitcher with consecutive complete games was Clayton Kershaw in July 2014.
It isn’t just that Yamamoto is the first Dodgers pitcher since Orel Hershiser in 1988 to throw consecutive complete games in the postseason. It’s that in the team’s 155 postseason games between Hershiser and Yamamoto’s NLCS dominance, there was only a single complete game, by José Lima in 2004. Again, the rough equivalent of once per entire season.
The Dodgers didn’t have a pitcher with two complete games in a whole season since Walker Buehler in 2019. Before Yamamoto, that is, but he did so in the postseason.
Yamamoto is one of only 10 Dodgers pitchers with multiple complete games in the same postseason, joining Sherry Smith (1920), Whit Wyatt (1941), Johnny Podres (1955), Sal Maglie (1956), Sandy Koufax (1963 and 1965), Don Sutton (1977), Fernando Valenzuela (1981), and Jerry Reuss (1981). Hershiser heads that group with three complete games in 1988.
The Dodgers have now thrown 33 complete games in the World Series, and a breakdown by ten-year periods show how times have changed.
Dodgers World Series complete games
- 1910s: 1 complete game in 5 games
- 1920s: 3 out of 7
- 1930s: 0 (did not make World Series)
- 1940s: 4 out of 17
- 1950s: 10 out of 33
- 1960s: 8 out of 15
- 1970s: 2 out of 17
- 1980s: 4 out of 11
- 1990s: 0 (did not make World Series)
- 2000s: 0 (did not make World Series)
- 2010s: 0 out of 12
- 2020s: 1 out of 13
Game 2 is the most prolific of World Series contests for Dodgers complete games, with eight. Four times has a Dodgers pitcher closed out a championship with a complete game — Johnny Podres in Game 7 in 1955, Koufax in Game 4 in 1963 and in Game 7 in 1965, and Hershiser in Game 5 in 1988.
Yamamoto, who has a 1.15 ERA and 30-percent strikeout rate in his last nine starts dating back to August, is lined up next to start Game 6, should the World Series find its way back to Toronto.
