When Yoshinobu Yamamoto arrived in Glendale, Arizona, for his first spring training with the Dodgers, fresh off signing the largest freeagent contract for a pitcher in MLB history, his new team quickly realized a minor problem.
When Yoshinobu Yamamoto arrived in Glendale, Arizona, for his first spring training with the Dodgers, fresh off signing the largest free-agent contract for a pitcher in MLB history, his new team quickly realized a minor problem.
The issue was not with Yamamoto himself — the then-25-year-old hurler was as good and as generationally talented as advertised — but with his interpreter, Yoshihiro "Hiro" Sonoda.
Most dedicated Asian-language interpreters in MLB have a baseball background. Giants slugger Jung Hoo-Lee's interpreter, Justin Han, worked for a team in the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) interpreting for the handful of American players making the cross-Pacific leap. Chicago Cubs All-Star Shota Imanaga has Edwin Stanberry, who played at the Division II level and spent a year playing independent ball. Tomoyuki Sugano's guy, Yuto Sakurai, worked in baseball operations for the Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants before joining the Orioles.
But Sonoda was a very different story. He had no significant experience in baseball. The listed job history on what appears to be his Linkedin page is oddly scarce and includes only one other vaguely described occupation: "Film Lighting." The specifics of Sonoda's hiring — organized by Yamamoto's agency, not the Dodgers — are hazy, but a story from Sonoda's alma mater stated that he received the job after an open search.
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Whatever the circumstances, Sonoda's lack of baseball background posed an interesting challenge for the Dodgers' player development group: How could they convey complex concepts to their $325 million player if the linguistic bridge between the two parties was unfamiliar with the very concepts that needed to be conveyed?
"You're going through two people," Dodgers coach Chris Woodward explained to Yahoo Sports. "So the interpreter has got to know just as much as the player, or the interpreter might misinterpret what you're saying."
The solution? Baseball boot camp.
All throughout that spring training, the Dodgers' battalion of ball-knowers put Sonoda through a hardball crash course. Pitching coaches Connor McGuiness and Mark Prior, alongside director of pitching Rob Hill, inundated the intelligent but unprepared former lighting engineer with the intricacies of the sport that now dominated his waking hours.
"We kind of flooded him with a ton of information," McGuiness told Yahoo Sports back in May. "Starting very basic level, all the way up to pitch data, classifications, getting him the Driveline [certification]. Making him follow [media members] so he can hear basic terminology. We got him to follow Pitching Ninja on Twitter and Lance [Brozdowski] and all these guys that are talking about this stuff. It's just like, 'Hey, when you're taking a dump, like, sit there and watch. How do they talk? What are the words they're using?'"
Slowly but surely, Sonoda sponged up the material.
Source: "AOL Sports"
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