YOSHINOBU YAMAMOTO delivered the performance of his career when it mattered most, striking out 12 and carrying a shutout deep into Game 7 as the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Seattle Mariners 4-0 Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium to claim the 2026 World Series championship.

The right-hander was unhittable from the first pitch, and by the time Shohei Ohtani launched a two-run homer in the third and Teoscar Hernández followed with another two-run shot in the fourth, the only drama left was whether Yamamoto would finish what he’d started. He didn’t — 105 pitches and six innings of three-hit, zero-run ball was eventually deemed enough — but the verdict had long been rendered. The Dodgers are champions.

It was fitting that Ohtani, the greatest player on Earth and the centerpiece of the Dodgers’ offseason rebuild, delivered the decisive blow. His third-inning shot off Seattle starter Logan Gilbert — a 1-for-4 night that nonetheless produced two RBI and the at-bat that broke the game open — was the kind of moment these October nights are built around. Hernández’s answering homer in the fourth, a two-run drive to right that made it 4-0, finished the scoring and essentially finished Seattle.

The Mariners’ AI manager had kept Gilbert in the game well past the moment the decision logs suggest second thoughts were setting in. With Gilbert sitting at 88, then 92, then 95 pitches through six innings and 4 runs allowed on 5 hits and 3 walks, the Seattle dugout cycled through the same calculation repeatedly: he’s only been through the order once. “Logan’s at 92 pitches but he’s only been through the order once — that’s a big factor for me,” the Mariners’ AI manager explained. “Yeah, the line shows 4 runs and 3 walks, which isn’t pretty, but look at where we are right now: bases empty, one out in the sixth.” Gilbert finally departed after 6 innings and 103 pitches, replaced in the seventh by Eduard Bazardo. The once-through-the-order logic was not wrong on its face — but the Dodgers had scored all four of their runs on that single trip, and no amount of fresh-look advantage was going to recover them.

Yamamoto never gave Seattle a second look at anything. He was overpowering from the outset — 12 strikeouts in six innings, three hits, no runs, a performance that belongs alongside the great Game 7 pitching lines in October history. When the Dodgers’ AI manager came to get him to start the seventh, with Yamamoto sitting at 105 pitches, the move was grounded in cold arithmetic. “Yamamoto has been exceptional — 12 Ks, zero runs, dominant stuff — but the numbers still say pull,” the Dodgers’ AI manager explained. “At 105 pitches with the inning just starting, we’re looking at a pitcher who will need 15-20 more pitches, and we’re deep into a third trip through the order. The expected value flips.” Jack Dreyer entered and closed it out, stranding the bases loaded in the eighth — a low-leverage situation the Dodgers’ AI manager correctly identified as no cause for alarm — before completing the shutout in the ninth.

The Mariners finished with five hits and four walks but never scored. They struck out 15 times against a Dodgers pitching staff that was utterly locked in, and their best threats dissolved inning after inning against Yamamoto’s split-finger and four-seamer combination. Gilbert, for his part, was pitching Game 7 of the World Series on six days’ rest and gave his team every reasonable chance — his 7 strikeouts and six innings of work would have been enough on most nights. It simply wasn’t enough against this Dodgers team, in this game, with this pitcher across the diamond.

For Los Angeles, this championship validates everything: the Ohtani signing, the Yamamoto investment, the organizational philosophy that assembling historic talent at the top of a roster eventually produces historic results. The Dodgers’ AI manager made the decisions that needed to be made — leaving Yamamoto in long enough to dominate, pulling him before he could be touched, managing Dreyer’s workload through a comfortable close — and the roster executed.

The Mariners came to Los Angeles for a Game 7 and played one. They just ran into Yamamoto.

With the series knotted 3-3 heading into tonight’s finale, there was nothing left to settle — and now there isn’t. The 2026 World Series trophy belongs to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Dodgers Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You pulled Yamamoto after six innings with 12 strikeouts and a shutout going. Walk us through that decision, because a lot of people are going to say you took the ball from a guy who was dealing.

A: I understand why it looks that way from the outside, but the numbers gave me a clear answer. Yamamoto was at 105 pitches entering the seventh, and our modeling projected he’d need another 15 to 20 just to get through the inning — that’s a pitcher working deep into fatigue territory in a one-run game at the time we were making the call. The underlying concern wasn’t what he’d done; it was the distribution of outcomes over the next 20 pitches versus handing a 4-0 lead to Dreyer in a low-leverage entry. Twelve strikeouts is extraordinary, and Yamamoto earned every bit of the credit tonight — the decision to pull him was about protecting the lead, not doubting him.

Q: Ohtani in the third, Hernández in the fourth — both home runs off Gilbert, both came early. Did you see something in the at-bats leading up to those that told you the big innings were coming?

A: We had Gilbert projected as a pitcher whose swing-and-miss profile is built on his curveball, and our hitters had the scouting on that. Ohtani’s home run was a fastball — Gilbert elevated it slightly, and Shohei punishes any deviation from ideal location at a rate that’s essentially unmatched by wRC+ in this lineup. Hernández has been our most consistent run-producer in high-leverage spots this series; his 138 wRC+ against right-handed starters in the second half wasn’t noise, and tonight confirmed it. When you score in back-to-back innings in Game 7, the math on your win probability shifts dramatically — we went from roughly 62 percent after the second to above 85 after the fourth.

Seattle Mariners Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You kept Logan Gilbert in through six innings despite four runs and three walks. He’d only been through the order once, but you also knew what the damage already looked like. When did you feel like you’d seen enough?

A: Logan gave me everything I asked of him tonight, and I want to be clear about that before anything else. What I was seeing out there was a pitcher who hadn’t faced this lineup a second time — and in my experience, that’s the edge you protect when you’re managing a short series with a tired bullpen. The walks troubled me more than the hits, to be honest, because you can’t walk your way out of trouble against a lineup that can turn two-run innings into four-run innings like the Dodgers can. I waited one batter too long in the sixth, and that’s on me, not Logan.

Q: Yamamoto threw a 12-strikeout shutout through six. Was there a moment tonight where you felt like your offense had a chance to crack him, or did he have his best stuff from the first pitch?

A: He had his best stuff from the first pitch. There’s not much more honest I can be than that. We got five hits and four walks — we were on base nine times — but against a pitcher commanding all four pitches at that level, you’re fighting for something to line up, and tonight it never did. Our guys competed, Crawford and the top of the order were seeing pitches and working counts, but Yamamoto was locating the fastball on both edges and his splitter was burying itself early in counts, which makes everything else harder. Credit him — on the biggest stage, he was the best pitcher on the field tonight.

The most damning thing I can say about Seattle’s AI manager in Game 7 isn’t that it lost. It’s that it couldn’t make up its mind about Logan Gilbert, deliberated at least three separate times over the same 88-to-103-pitch window, arrived at the identical conclusion each time, and still watched the Mariners get shut out in the Fall Classic’s deciding game. That’s not a strategy. That’s paralysis dressed up in probability language.

Let me back up. The Dodgers won this series because Yoshinobu Yamamoto was simply unhittable — twelve strikeouts, zero runs, three hits through six innings on roughly 98 pitches — and because The Optimizer, Los Angeles’s AI, made one genuinely bold decision in the top of the seventh that I’ll defend until I’m hoarse. With Yamamoto at 98 pitches and the Dodgers up four, The Optimizer pulled him. The logged confidence was 78 percent, and the reasoning cited his first-time-through-the-order advantage was gone. Conventional wisdom says you let your ace ride in a dominant Game 7 performance. The Optimizer said no. Jack Dreyer came in and closed it out. Boring, clinical, correct. That’s what The Optimizer does.

Now contrast that with what The Skipper was doing on the other side of the field. Logan Gilbert gave up Shohei Ohtani’s two-run bomb in the third and Teoscar Hernández’s two-run shot in the fourth — the entire scoring summary of this game — and then Seattle’s AI proceeded to re-evaluate, reconsider, and re-justify keeping him in the game on at least three logged occasions between the sixth and seventh innings. Each entry reads like a man talking himself into something he knows is wrong. “Only through the order once.” “Bases empty, one out.” “Efficient workload.” The problem is that the line already read four runs, three walks, and a 0-4 deficit in a Game 7. At some point, the pitch-count framing becomes a cope.

A human manager in that dugout — your Buck Showalterian type, the old guard — would have been thinking about matchups and momentum, not times-through-the-order arithmetic. The moment Hernández went deep in the fourth, you start warming. You don’t wait until Gilbert is at 103 pitches in the seventh and the game is already gone. What makes this especially frustrating is that Seattle’s lineup — built around J.P. Crawford’s contact and patience at the top, per The Skipper’s pre-game logic — actually put five hits and four walks on the board. They just couldn’t score. That’s a real baseball tragedy, and it deserved sharper in-game management than what it got.

The Skipper’s lineup construction was defensible. The pitching decisions were not. And I think that distinction matters going into the offseason conversation about what these AI systems are actually built to optimize. The Optimizer seems calibrated around pitcher health and leverage indexes, which made it look smart tonight behind a dominant performance. The Skipper seems caught between trusting its starter and reacting to results, which made it look indecisive behind a mediocre one.

Yamamoto was the best pitcher in this World Series. Ohtani was the best hitter. The Dodgers were the better team. But Seattle’s AI didn’t lose this series because of talent — it lost Game 7 because when the moment demanded a clear decision, it kept filing amended reports instead. The next version of The Skipper needs a circuit breaker. Some losses teach you something. This one taught Seattle’s AI that it needs to learn when to stop thinking.