This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer's Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter , click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox. These massages can be long, from 45 minutes to two hours, leaving Gilbert -- and many Mariners players -- extended time to connect with manual therapist Kazuhiro Yamamoto, who oversees these procedures.
Yamamoto, who is from Tokyo and moved to the U. He's always positive, always wanting to help other people out. And so it's kind of like a calming effect and some stability and an otherwise unstable job. Yamamoto joined the Mariners ahead of the season with an extensive background in manual therapy -- but virtually none in baseball, making his path to the sport both fascinating and inspiring.
During the offseason for those sports, he traveled to Las Vegas and worked at a private massage practice specializing in performing arts, which remains his true passion. Yamamoto also worked a stint as an athletic trainer for the department of theater and dance at Ball State University. Baseball can be a challenging industry to break into with no experience in the sport, but Yamamoto sold himself for having a uniquely different lens. Specifically, Yamamoto arrived with a specialization in Japanese Seitai, a manual therapy technique to restore the proper skeletal frame by manipulating soft tissue and allowing the body to self heal.
He describes his clinical interests as performing arts medicine, chronic pain management, eastern medicine, and interdisciplinary healthcare. It's very intense. Performing arts is kind of the same, like they have like eight to nine shows every week. Also, baseball has a very international environment, which is another reason I think it's very similar, and what I wanted to do.
In my first year, players were teaching me all the rules in the dugout. Sign up to receive our daily Morning Lineup to stay in the know about the latest trending topics around Major League Baseball. Skip to Content. Share share-square Yamamoto has also come to love the game -- and it loves him back.
