Japanese baseball star Yoshinobu Yamamoto (26), who will be wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform for the 2024 season, will start next month’s opening two-game series of the MLB World Series at Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul, South Korea.
“We’re going to use Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow as starters,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, 52, told local reporters at spring training in Arizona on Wednesday. He didn’t say what the starting order would be. “It could change depending on the situation, but it makes sense for them to pitch in Korea,” Roberts said.
Yamamoto is considered one of the two horsemen of Japanese baseball, along with “baseball genius” Shohei Ohtani, 30. 안전놀이터 He donned a Dodgers uniform last December when he signed a 12-year, $325 million (about 434 billion won) contract with the team. He is known as the “Billion Dollar Men” alongside Ohtani, who signed a 10-year, $700 million (approx. 93.6 billion won) contract, the largest contract in world sports history.
Yamamoto, who played in Japan until last season, will make his MLB debut in Seoul.
He has played for the Orix Buffaloes of the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) since 2017, and is a standout pitcher who led the NPB Pacific League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts for three consecutive years starting in 2021.
In his professional career in Japan, he has compiled a 70-29 record with a 1.82 ERA and 922 strikeouts, and has been named the league’s Most Valuable Player and the Sawamura Award, the Japanese version of the Cy Young Award, for the past three years. The 6-foot-4 right-hander has a fastball that sits in the upper 90s and a variety of pitches that he uses to his advantage.
The San Diego Padres, who will face the Dodgers, have yet to announce their starting pitchers for the opening two games.
This year’s official MLB opener is getting unprecedented attention in South Korea. The Dodgers and Padres will open the 2024 MLB regular season with a two-game “Seoul Series” at Gocheok Dome in Seoul, South Korea, on March 20 and 21 at 7:05 p.m., 카지노사이트 추천 about a month from now. MLB announced Seoul as the official Opening Day location for the 2024 season last July and sent a team to inspect the facility in August. Currently, Gocheok Dome is undergoing a “transformation” to host the MLB Opening Day. The two teams will play a series of exhibition games against Korean teams before the opening two games.