Hideo Nomo end of the year, Nomo returned to the Dodgers, in , and ended up having his best season since 1996, finished with a 16–6, 193 K, and 3.39 ERA. The following year, he had another great season, going 16–13 with 177 K and a 3.09 ERA. During September , however, he began showing signs of injury and fatigue. Nomo began to struggle again in . After undergoing shoulder surgery in October 2003, he was benched after going 4–11 with an 8.25 ERA for the Dodgers (the worst ERA in the history of baseball for a player with at least 15
Robert Whiting extensively on current issues impacting both Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, including a four-part series, which was published in the "Japan Times", followed by an in-depth series on Sadaharu Oh, Trey Hillman, Bobby Valentine and Hideo Nomo for the same paper. In October 2011, he wrote a three-part series for "The Japan Times" on the talented, but troubled, Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu, who had died in California two months earlier of an apparent suicide. In a shifting era of globalization, Whiting is one of the few sports experts to explore the transnational flows of athletics. In his works