For a moment on Friday, everything must have seemed horribly familiar to New York Yankees fans.
Masahiro Tanaka gave up a home run just three pitches into his major-league debut as Toronto's Melky Cabrera deposited a breaking ball over the centre-field fence.
That evoked memories of another high-priced Japanese import, Kei Igawa, who seven years ago allowed a first-inning homer in his US debut and ultimately had a Yankees career best described as forgettable.
Baltimore hit Igawa for seven runs in five innings that day, raising questions over the wisdom of the Yankees spending US$46 million (Dh169m) on him.
Considering the club spent upwards of $175m to sign Tanaka, it would have been understandable if there were queasy stomachs across the Bronx.
Tanaka quickly settled down, though, displaying mental strength in addition to his wide array of pitches.
He gave up three runs (two earned) and six hits on 97 pitches, striking out eight Toronto hitters and walking none in seven innings as the Yankees won 7-3.
“You see guys, sometimes they get hit early and they don’t make it out of the first inning,” Mark Teixeira, the Yankees first baseman, told the New York Daily News.
“First big-league batter he faces hits a home run, and it doesn’t faze him at all? That’s a great sign.”
Tanaka’s much-discussed split-finger fastball played a significant role in his successful debut. Spending much of the night pounding the bottom of the strike zone with breaking pitches, only four of the 27 Toronto batters he faced hit balls that reached the outfield on the fly.
Cabrera’s home run came on a splitter that flattened out over the plate, but otherwise the go-to pitch lived up to its reputation as nearly unhittable.
The fervour over Tanaka’s splitter goes beyond baseball circles.
Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who specialises in baseball, told The New Yorker the pitch was “probably the closest we’ve ever seen to ideal, in terms of how closely it mimics a four-seam fastball at the point of release.”
Tanaka’s consistent form and long stride give batters few hints on which pitch to expect prior to the ball leaving his hand and less time in which to react.
Overheated rhetoric is rarely in short supply when the Yankees are involved, and high expectations would have followed Tanaka wherever he landed after compiling a 24-0 record and leading the Rakuten Tohoku Golden Eagles to the Japan Series title last year.
While Friday’s was just one start that was far from flawless, it also suggested the Yankees might at last have a Japanese pitcher who is worth all the fuss.
pfreelend@thenational.ae
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