Yoshinobu Yamamoto was a top-three candidate for the 2025 NL Cy Young award, but it was Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes that took home the award unanimously. Yamamoto finished in third place, receiving zero first or second place votes as Philadelphia Phillies southpaw Cristopher Sánchez finished as the unanimous runner-up.

The record didn’t look too appealing for Skenes at 10-10, a similar issue that Jacob deGrom faced during his pair of Cy Young awards in 2018-19, but Skenes proved to be the one of most valuable pitcher in all of baseball in terms of fWAR at 6.5, ranking just under the AL Cy Young award winner Tarik Skubal. Skenes posted a league-leading 1.97 ERA after posting a 1.96 ERA as a rookie last year, and his 216 strikeouts were tied with Phillies lefty Jesús Luzardo for second best in the NL. Skenes becomes the first Pirate to win the Cy Young award since Doug Drabek in 1990, and he is the first pitcher to win the award despite playing for a team at the bottom of their division since Felix Hernández with the Seattle Mariners in 2010.

Yamamoto is the first Dodger to receive Cy Young votes since Julio Urías in 2022, and was by far and wide the best pitcher for the Dodgers during the regular season and postseason. Yamamoto became the first Dodgers starter with at least 10 wins in a season since Clayton Kershaw in 2023, overall posting a 12-8 record with a 2.49 ERA and 201 strikeouts across 30 starts. Yamamoto followed up an impressive regular season with a postseason that will live on in baseball history, with a Herculean effort tossing a combined 17 2/3 innings in the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays.

Yamamoto now joins Padres starter Yu Darvish, former Dodger Kenta Maeda and former Mariners starter Hisashi Iwakuma as the only Japanese-born pitchers to place within the top-3 in Cy Young voting, with Darvish and Maeda both being the most recent as the NL and AL runner-up respectively in 2020.