SB Nation • 5 min read

Yoshinobu Yamamoto & the Dodgers’ lack of run support

Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been the ballast for the Dodgers pitching staff, Mr. Reliable, the only member of the starting rotation to be active all season. He’s the first Dodgers pitcher with enough innings to qualify for leaderboards in three seasons.

And he’s barely gotten any run support at all from the Dodgers. Among the 119 pitchers to start at least 18 games this season — the number Baseball Reference uses to weed out the riffraff — Yamamoto has received the fourth-lowest run support while still

in the game.

I sorted through Yamamoto’s game logs because his season has been fascinating. In all, the Dodgers have scored 113 runs in the 28 games Yamamoto has started, and average of 4.04 runs per game. The Dodgers in their other 124 games this season have scored 5.36 runs per game while hitting .261/335/456. In Yamamoto 28 starts, they are hitting .221/.306/.367.

Only sixty of those 113 runs scored while Yamamoto was still the active pitcher of record and had not yet been replaced on the mound. But some of those runs were scored after Yamamoto threw his final pitch of the game:

April 11 vs. Cubs: Tommy Edman’s three-run homer in the bottom of the sixth broke a 0-0 tie
May 14 vs. A’s: Miguel Rojas doubled home Michael Conforto to snap a 3-3 tie in the sixth inning
June 25 at Rockies: Scoreless after five innings, Dodgers rallied for three runs in the top of the sixth
August 24 at Padres: tied 2-2 after six innings, Dalton Rushing and Freddie Freeman each homered in a five-run seventh inning

That’s 12 runs that snapped ties and ultimately earned Yamamoto four wins, but they all happened after he threw his final pitch. When Yamamoto was actually in the game, the Dodgers have only scored 48 runs, which comes out to 2.66 runs per 27 outs for his 162 1/3 innings on the season.

Yamamoto, with his sparkling 2.66 ERA that ranks sixth in the majors, has started 165 different innings on the season, and he’s only pitched with a lead in 58 of them, just 35.2 percent of the time.

The Dodgers have scored zero or one run with Yamamoto in the game in 14 of his 28 starts, exactly half. And that’s counting the runs that scored after his threw his last pitch. Take away those, and the Dodgers have scored zero or one run in 16 of his 28 starts while he’s on the mound.

They’ve scored more in Yamamoto starts after his work on the mound was finished, with 65 runs compared to just 48 while he was pitching.

In a weird quirk of the schedule, Yamamoto’s final home start of the regular season, on Thursday night against the Giants, is just his third at Dodger Stadium since the All-Star break, with nine of his last 11 starts coming on the road.