CHICAGO – Yoshinobu Yamamoto sauntered through the Los Angeles Dodgers clubhouse Saturday morning before a day that could have been etched in baseball history. He popped his head into the manager’s office, said hello, and exuded a calm that would last through what was one out shy of the greatest stretch of consecutive retired batters in Major League Baseball history.Mookie Betts’ error on a ground ball from Chicago White Sox second baseman Chase Meidroth kept Yamamoto from matching Yusmeiro Petit’s record of retiring 46 consecutive batters — the longest such stretch in the majors since at least 1920 — and snapped Yamamoto’s bid for the 25th perfect game in MLB history.
Oh no…
Yamamoto loses his perfect game bid with 2 outs in the 8th as Betts can't make this play at SS. pic.twitter.com/XfFDWWtebc
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) June 13, 2026A batter later, Jacob Gonzalez grounded out to end Yamamoto’s eighth no-hit inning of the afternoon. When they returned to the dugout, Yamamoto greeted Betts with a pat on the rear.Then came another cruel flashback, as White Sox outfielder Tristan Peters sent Yamamoto’s second pitch of the ninth inning and 105th pitch of the day into the seats for a home run to keep Yamamoto from his first no-hitter in the United States. When Yamamoto returned to the dugout after his day was done with 8 1/3 memorable innings to his name, Shohei Ohtani leaned over and said something. Yamamoto tilted his head back and laughed at how cruelly close he was to something special.Yamamoto has flirted with history before. The Japanese-born right-hander came within one out last September of the first Dodgers no-hitter since 2018, and the first solo no-hitter for the franchise since Clayton Kershaw in 2014. When that night ended in disaster, first with a Jackson Holliday home run to snap it and then a bullpen implosion to lose the game entirely, Yamamoto was just starting a brilliant run. The following month, as the Dodgers reeled off their second consecutive World Series title, Yamamoto etched his place into all-time lore in delivering three victories (including in relief in Game 7) in the matchup with the Toronto Blue Jays.His latest brush with immortality started last week, in the midst of a blowout victory against the Los Angeles Angels. Yamamoto quickly and efficiently dispatched the last 22 batters he faced that night to complete his eight innings of one-run ball. Following that start, catcher Dalton Rushing giddily described Yamamoto’s brilliance, noting that even the reigning World Series MVP was able to experiment and try some new sequencing out while flexing his dominance.
