TORONTO — He is the man who broke the plan. The right arm that caused Hal Steinbrenner to give up his quest to keep the 2014 Yankees’ payroll under $189 million.
After finally has pitching in a game that matters, Masahiro Tanaka showed us how critical he will be to the Yankees’ new plan. The one in which their top-heavy roster covers up more blemishes than you’ll see on a 30-year-old roof.
“He is definitely the real deal,” Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said Friday night, after Tanaka excelled in his major league debut, pitching the Yankees to a 7-3 victory over Toronto at Rogers Centre.
If the $175 million man didn’t live up to your hype, then you set the bar awfully high. Tanaka overcame a shaky first couple of innings — he battled nervousness and struggled to focus, he said — to last seven innings while allowing six hits, three runs (two earned) and no walks while striking out eight.
“As the game progressed, I think I was getting better,” Tanaka said through his interpreter.
Yet the Yankees’ postgame clubhouse did not emanate all smiles, despite playing well after a harrowing, early-morning flight from Houston. That’s because the increasingly brittle Mark Teixeira left the game in the second inning with a strained right hamstring, and the soon-to-be-34-year-old expressed scant optimism he would be able to avoid the disabled list.
That could leave the Yankees with a starting infield of Kelly Johnson at first base, Brian Roberts at second base, Derek Jeter at shortstop and Yangervis Solarte at third base, with Dean Anna in reserve and Russ Canzler a possibility to be called up from Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Even though Solarte clocked another strong night, slugging two doubles and driving home three runs, that represents anything but a championship infield.
Depth is not a virtue of these Yankees, a bad sign as they try to contend in baseball’s toughest division with a $200ish-million payroll. However, if you were to match up each American League East team’s top-10 players? Then the Yankees might have a shot. And Tanaka for sure would be in that top 10.
The 25-year-old gave up a home run to his very first batter in the big leagues, our old Yankees pal and budding website designer Melky Cabrera. And the Jays scored two more in the second — aided by a Teixeira throwing error — to go from down, 2-1, to up, 3-2. The introduction was veering toward “bust.”
However, Tanaka started trusting his fastball more at that juncture, using that to set up his slider and split-finger fastball, and he fanned Cabrera and Colby Rasmus to end the second and strand Jays at first and second.
After manager Joe Girardi correctly used his challenge to overturn a wrong third-inning call on Ichiro Suzuki at first base, which changed the play from the inning’s last out to the spark for Solarte’s game-winning, two-run double, Tanaka took that 4-3 lead and protected it fiercely, retiring 15 of the 17 batters he faced from the third through the seventh.
“He settled down great,” Girardi said. “The first couple of innings were a little rough. To go seven innings in under 100 pitches [97], he did a really good job.”
Tanaka received help from his $153 million fellow newcomer, Jacoby Ellsbury, who put together a monster game with two doubles, a single, a walk, a stolen base and a nice, sliding catch on Dioner Navarro’s line drive to end the sixth inning. Carlos Beltran drove in the game’s first run with a single, too.
The Yankees will require their top players to carry their considerable dead weight, and the fantasy calls for Tanaka to join CC Sabathia, Hiroki Kuroda, Ivan Nova and Saturday’s debut performer Michael Pineda and give the Yankees the best starting rotation in the AL East. So far, Tanaka, Kuroda and Nova have delivered sufficiently, and Sabathia not at all.
Last winter began with the Yankees trying to both sign Tanaka and drop their player expenditures beneath the luxury-tax threshold. That plan blew up because of the changing of the Japanese posting system, by which Tanaka’s taxable income roughly tripled.
Steinbrenner relinquished his “math geek” dream (he has used the term to describe himself) in favor of his baseball dream, and Yankees fans will get to see the fruit of that decision Wednesday at Yankee Stadium, when Tanaka makes his Bronx debut.
He provided a most positive first impression on Friday. That has to prove a trend, not an aberration, for this plan to work.