TORONTO -- It was just over five months ago that Yoshinobu Yamamoto turned to watch Mookie Betts turn a World Series-clinching double play, then threw his hands up in elation as his teammates swept him up in the beginning of a celebration that would last deep into the night.
Yamamoto cemented himself as a Dodgers postseason legend last fall, capping the back-to-back championship run with World Series MVP honors. On Tuesday night, he'll return to the mound where he pitched three times in the Fall Classic, including recording the final out of Game 7 on zero days' rest.
To Dodgers fans, he truly came to embody his own rallying call from earlier in the postseason: "Losing isn't an option." To Blue Jays fans, he was the force who stood in the way of bringing a championship back to their city. As such, he knows that the home crowd may let him have it when he's back on the Rogers Centre mound.
"I don't care about that," Yamamoto said with a laugh through interpreter Yoshihiro Sonoda on Monday.
Yamamoto remarkably pitched in World Series Games 2, 6 and 7 in Toronto, winning all three. He allowed one run while going the distance in Game 2, one start after he also tossed a complete game during the NLCS. In Game 6, he held the Blue Jays to one run across six innings -- then did something he had never done in his professional career, pitch on back-to-back days.
The Dodgers had seen Yamamoto act as their ace and their stopper all season long, but he especially rose to the occasion when the stakes were the highest. He twirled 2 2/3 scoreless frames in relief, the most innings of all six Dodgers who pitched that night.
"To be honest, I wasn't thinking about it until the moment I got up to the mound," Yamamoto said of pitching in Games 6 and 7. "But as I was getting warmed up in the bullpen, it started getting real."
In sum, Yamamoto allowed just two runs over 17 2/3 innings (1.02 ERA) across three appearances in the span of eight days -- and even warmed up in the 'pen to pitch a potential 19th inning in the marathon Game 3 (but Freddie Freeman walked it off before it got to that point).
Yamamoto became the first pitcher to win three games in a single World Series since Hall of Famer Randy Johnson did it for the D-backs in 2001, and just the 14th overall. No other pitcher has had all three of those wins come on the road.
In each of his first two starts of the Dodgers' bid for a three-peat, Yamamoto tossed six innings of two-run ball. Coming off his second and best season in the Majors, the 27-year-old right-hander seems poised to take another step forward as his team vies for MLB's first three-peat since the 1998-2000 Yankees.
Yamamoto felt some sentimentality coming back to the ballpark where he pitched in arguably some of the biggest games of his life, but as always, he's putting those feelings aside to focus on the task at hand. Last November, it was winning a championship. On Tuesday, it's simply getting the Dodgers one more notch in the win column.
"I treat every game just like the same, no matter how important, how big the game is," Yamamoto said. "And then normal games, I just pretend that it's the biggest game as well."