Bronx, N.Y., May 17, 2013 — On Friday night, Hiroki Kuroda put a stop to that seemingly rarest of 2013 Yankee experiences, a two-game losing streak, and even rarer, a loss in a one-run game. Hiroki was willing (and obviously able) to win a one-run game himself, something it seemed he might have to do given the unexpected trouble the Yanks were having with Mark Buehrle’s slow and slower stuff.
The Yanks jumped up 1-0 when Brett Gardner led off the bottom of the first with a triple to the left center field gap, and a walk and Robbie Cano grounder plated the run. But wielding an 80-mph cutter, a change about two ticks slower, and a fastball that rarely broke 85, Buehrle established something, striking out two to finish the first, and holding the home team hitless until rookie David Adams led off the fifth with a single. The young third baseman, playing his third major league game, later scored the second run on a sac fly once fellow rook, catcher Austin Romine, had singled him into scoring position.
The same combo later was at it again, keying, with two-base hits around a perfect Ichiro Suzuki bunt single, a three-run outbreak in the seventh that forged the 5-0 final score. And it was a good time for the kids to erupt, because on a team that had scored just two runs on back-to-back nights, the third through sixth batters in the lineup combined by going 1-for-16 with Cano’s early rbi their only positive stat.
It’s almost a shame (but not really) that the young heroics weren’t really needed. Toronto’s lineup is loaded with power, so anytime one of their boppers came up to the plate with someone on base it was a nervous time. But Kuroda had a solution for that too, because he allowed but three baserunners, two hits and a walk, through his eight innings. And he picked Munenori Kawasaki (the walk) off two pitches after he sent him to first.
Kuroda picked a storied day in Yankee history to fashion his finest start in what is shaping up as a very good year for him, as this was the 15th anniversary of David Wells’s perfect game, a 4-0 shutout of the Twins in old Yankee Stadium in 1998. But despite the stellar results, Hiroki has had better numbers, a revelation that jives a bit more with some other big May 17 baseball, the offensive-oriented kind, like the the pair of two-run homers off Jonathan Papelbon in the ninth inning that the Bombers used to beat the Red Sox 11-9 in 2010, and the Jason Giambi walkoff grand slam from three runs down to beat Minnesota 13-12 in 2002, something only Babe Ruth had achieved before him. Similarly, the Phillies beat the Cubs 23-22 in 10 innings on May 17, 1979, a day the winds were clearly blowing out at Wrigley Field.
Kuroda’s 67/41 strikes/balls ratio was good, but not the 2/1 number pitching coaches long for. He threw 15 first-pitch strikes to 26 batters, and went to seven three-ball counts, but with just the one walk. He struck out five, all of them swinging, fooling the big-swinging Jays to swing and miss 14 times to get the five key outs. A vicious J.P. Arencibia “look what I found” liner into Hiroki’s glove denied the Jays their best scoring chance in the first. Deep liners to left and center by Adam Lind and Colby Rasmus, respectively, in the top of fifth scared the fanbase, but he walked calmly off the mound after coaxing ground-ball outs from three of his last four batters in the seventh and the eighth. Rookie Preston Claiborne preserved the shutout, barely, pitching a one-strike-out, two-hit ninth.
Not only did Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, whose most famous works are The Birth of Venus and The Adoration of the Magi, die on this day in 1510, some 503 years ago, some sources give this day as his birthday too, 65 years earlier. The numbers may have not been the prettiest, but the Yankee veteran faced a Toronto team that had won four straight and scored 33 runs in their last three games. He not only blanked them, but did so on just two hits.
Sounds like a Hero-K work of art to me.
BTW,TYW
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!