What sets Yamamoto apart -- even from Dodgers' other 4 aces

The Dodgers' starting rotation, at full force, is home to some of the nastiest secondary pitches in baseball: Tarik Skubal's changeup … Shohei Ohtani's sweeper … Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow's curveballs.

All those pitches, though, as nasty as they are, are still secondaries. For every Dodgers ace, the most-used pitch in their arsenal remains the good old four-seam fastball.

That is, all except for one: Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Yoshi's No. 1 pitch is his splitter.

For the first time in his MLB career, Yamamoto is throwing his splitter more than even his fastball -- just barely, but he is. He's the only one of the Dodgers' five aces whose primary pitch is a secondary pitch.

Entering tonight's start against the D-backs, in which he'll try to put a stop to the Dodgers' seven-game losing streak and tie his single-season high in wins, Yamamoto has thrown 531 splitters this season, just barely outnumbering his 517 four-seamers, and well ahead of his 281 cutters, 251 sinkers, 250 curveballs and 126 sliders.

Even as fastball usage continues to decline league-wide, in favor of wipeout breaking and offspeed pitches, this is not something that's very common, particularly for a starting pitcher. Most starters still throw their fastballs the most to get through their games.

But Yamamoto is a workhorse, one of the best in the league, and he's still managed to be splitter-first. Of the top 10 starters in MLB this season by Statcast's pitching run value metric, Yamamoto is the only one who doesn't throw some variety of fastball most frequently. (Chris Sale was close, with his slider, but the next-best pitcher after Yamamoto with a non-fastball top pitch type is Jesús Luzardo, with his sweeper.)

For Yamamoto, this trend first started in the 2025 postseason, when he threw his splitter more than any other pitch on his way to World Series MVP honors, and it has continued into 2026.

This is more evolution than revolution. It's not like Yamamoto's splitter usage has skyrocketed from what it was in his first two seasons in the Majors. It's incrementally increased from season to season, yes, but really, the reason Yamamoto's splitter has become his most-thrown pitch in 2026 is because he's mixing all of his different pitch types more evenly than before. The pitches around the splitter have changed more than the splitter itself has, but the result is that the splitter is now the first pitch you see.

In particular, Yamamoto is sacrificing a bunch of four-seamers to get that balanced arsenal, and as the four-seamers have gone down and the splitters have slowly ticked up, the two pitches have flip-flopped in Yamamoto's pecking order.

When we asked Yamamoto recently about how he was using his splitter differently this season, he said: "It really depends on the situation and the matchups. Because these days, I have a lot of other selections."

When we first noticed that Yamamoto's splitter had supplanted his four-seamer as his most-thrown pitch this season, our first thought was that he must be using it to put more hitters away, since his splitter is a great strikeout pitch. But that's actually not what's happening.

Yamamoto's two-strike splitter usage has actually gone down this season. So has his splitter usage when ahead in the count. And yet, his overall splitter usage is up.

So what is happening? Yamamoto is deploying his splitter in a wider variety of situations than he used to. He's broadening his splitter horizons, and that has buoyed the pitch to the top of his arsenal.

Yamamoto is throwing more splitters, for example, to start an at-bat. His first-pitch splitter usage as a rookie in 2024 was 10%. This year, it's 19%. And even beyond just the first pitch, Yamamoto is throwing more splitters in early counts in general. He's also using the splitter to get back into at-bats when he falls behind, which is something he rarely did in his first two seasons.

So the philosophy for Yamamoto is not "just throw more splitters." It could have been that … his splitter is so good that he might've just wanted to spam it … but it's not that. It's really, "use the splitter in a more balanced way."

That philosophy only works because of Yamamoto's command. He is very good at locating his pitches, including the split, which can be a hard pitch to throw consistently anywhere other than "down in the dirt."

But Yamamoto does not waste a lot of splitters. He mainly keeps his splitter on the edges of the strike zone (where he throws it 43% of the time) or uses it as a chase pitch just off the zone (31% of the time), where the hitter is still tempted to swing at it.

His splitter locations also vary situationally. When he throws it while behind in the count -- which, again, he's doing more often this season -- he lands it in the strike zone 48% of the time. When he throws it as a putaway pitch with two strikes, it's in the zone under 30% of the time.

Yamamoto has rare feel for pitching, not just with the splitter but with all the other pitches in his arsenal -- four-seamer, sinker, curveball, cutter, slider -- and that's why hitters can't adjust to him, as he gets them out inning after inning.