A HEAD START
Tanaka looks more like playoff hero than ’17 dud
TORONTO — Of course we make too much of a big deal about the first days of baseball season, all of it. We dive right in to the pool of small-sample sizes (SSS) because if you are fan who takes this stuff seriously, and who misses the sport terribly in its absence, you can’t help yourself. You OD on SSS. Except sometimes small-sample sizes can be terribly relevant. Sometimes the first hours of a season can tell you an awful lot about the season to come. Such was the case with Masahiro Tanaka a year ago. You may remember, he blitzed the Grapefruit League a year ago, making every hitter he faced look like a junior varsity scrub.
Then the season started, in St. Petersburg, Fla.
And before Tanaka could record his first three outs of the season, he allowed three earned runs. He would allow seven in 2 2/3 innings. That was the harbinger. There was one sevenstart stretch in May and June when he was 0-6 with an 8.91 ERA and 15 home runs allowed. A bad start bred a brutal middle and, despite a strong finish, a most pedestrian 13-12 overall record and a 4.74 ERA.
And a desire, a strong one, to make things right this time around.
“You always want to get off to a good start,” Tanaka said Friday night.
He said this in a loud Yankees clubhouse that has yet to trail in 2018, that saw Tanaka turn in a vintage six-inning stint in a 4-2 win over the Jays: three hits, eight strikeouts, one skinny run. He only threw 79 pitches and easily could have gone two more innings if necessary, and looked just as strong facing his final hitter as his first.
“Just a really good effort by a mature, experienced pitcher,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He mixed his pitches, threw enough fastballs. He was hurt by one fastball but otherwise commanded the strike zone.”
Said Tanaka: “I feel a little relieved now.”
Luis Severino has clearly zoomed past Tanaka to the top of the Yankees rotation, but that is hardly a bad thing as far as the team is concerned because Tanaka has the ability to be just about the best No. 2 pitcher in baseball when his stuff is working as it was Friday night.
And, of course, it is useful to remember that for all of his struggles in 2017, Tanaka ended the season beautifully. There was a seven-inning, three-hit, 15-strikeout, zero-walk gem against these same Blue Jays in his final regular-season start.
There were seven more shutout innings against the Indians in Game 3 of the ALDS, the game that turned that series upside-down, seven strikeouts and only one walk. And he was brilliant against the Astros in the ALCS, going 1-1 but allowing only two earned runs in 13 innings, and shoving the Yanks right to the borderline of the World Series with seven shutout innings in Game 5.
That was far more reminiscent of the pitcher who took the American League by storm his first three years, when he was 39-16, with a 3.12 ERA, a 1.045 WHIP and a strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly 5 ½ to 1. Severino is only getting better, but when you start to think of what he and Tanaka can do if they decide to Koufax-andDrysdale the league this year, backed by that lineup …
“I think if all of our starters live up to our potential, if we keep doing a good job, good things are going to happen for this team,” Tanaka said.
It is one game, yes, and we are starting to see that the Blue Jays, quite possibly, are a terrible team. But you don’t grade on a curve in baseball. And just as easily as negative momentum can consume you — as it consumed Tanaka in 2017 — it can carry you the other way, too.
“I’m glad I was on the other side of the ball,” Yankees second baseman Tyler Wade said Friday, echoing what several of his teammates had said about Severino the day before. Hard to blame any of them. They’ve looked that good, and that sharp. And when that happens, the Yankees really do look like something else.