TORONTO -- A 66-year-old manwith a pierced left ear and a backward cap stood in the outfield at Rogers Centre early Sunday morning and beheld all that surrounded him. Tri-color confetti littered the turf, the videoboard in center field touted the Los Angeles Dodgers ' latest World Series championship, and Osamu Yada -- the man who made it all possible -- grinned at his great fortune.

Yada Sensei, as he is known, plays a number of roles for Dodgers right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto , whose performance in Los Angeles' 5-4 victory in Game 7 of the World Series will go down in the annals of baseball history. Yada is a biomechanist first and foremost, obsessive about how the body's movement patterns apply force to a baseball. Beyond that, he is a philosophical guru, a bridge between the ocea

See Full Page