Yamato actually didn't do much of anything against Taffy 3 as it changed course to avoid 3 torpedos from the USS Herrmann and took itself out of the fight. It didn't sink anything and spent a lot of time dodging FM2s and TBMs. It did not sink Gambier Bay, Johnston, Hoel or Samual B Roberts. The Fast Battleships of the USN were with Halsey too far away to do any good. Had Yamato kept coming it probably would have been the BBs of Olendorf including the rebuilt Pearl survivors that would have been shooting at it. Hard to say how that would have gone as US fire control radars were quite good. West Virginia scored on her first salvos at 22,000 yards at night when Olendorf crossed the T against the Japanese fleet in Surigo Straits
The problem there would be, if memory serves correct, the "Ghosts of Pearl Harbor" were carrying a lot of HE rounds, and not a lot of AP rounds, because they were tasked mostly with shore bombardment, not to mention their guns were not nearly so powerful as the 16" naval rifles of the Iowa class. It might have been real hard to take on the Yamato with mostly HE rounds. In that case, the best you could hope for is to try to wreck the Yamato's topside, the less heavily armored bridge, etc, with HE, so that the control would be greatly reduced, and then hope you could hammer her with what AP you had.
The big problem with deciding what was necessary to take out either of the Yamato class ships was that claims of hits on a ship like that during battle were not necessarily accurate, and with so many claimed, and possible, it is difficult to know which hits did what damage. Either of those ships, in their final battles, could have been hit many times after they had already been fatally damaged. Given their size, it could take hours before they sunk, even if they were fatally damaged. Unless you have a hit like the Arizona or the Hood took, you often do not know which hit was fatal.
