There was nothing more for Yoshinobu Yamamoto to do — so he rested.
The Orix Buffaloes’ brilliant 23-year-old pitcher carried the team to the brink of the Pacific League pennant with a shutout in the club’s season finale on Monday, but the rest was out of his talented hands. The team still needed a favorable result from the matchup between the second-place Chiba Lotte Marines and Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles on Wednesday. So on Tuesday, Yamamoto took it easy and “didn’t do anything special.”
On Wednesday, Yamamoto was back on the mound at Kyocera Dome, but instead of pitching, he was surrounded by his jubilant teammates as they celebrated the end of a drought that began before he was even born as the Buffaloes, for the first time in 25 years, were finally able to call themselves Pacific League champions again.