TAMPA — It’s simple, really, and Masahiro Tanaka seems to understand that. Weed through the translations — not simply Japanese to English, but also Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League and the American League East — and the task before him is not a complicated one.
“How many different pitches did he throw?” someone asked Tanaka’s interpreter, Shingo Horie, after the Yankees’ newest curiosity finished a 32-pitch, 22-strike shift against the Phillies, throwing two scoreless innings and offering a taste of every weapon in his arsenal.
Horie dutifully repeated the question in Japanese, as he had done for most of the 10-minute Q-and-A session — interpreting in a postgame clubhouse can be exhausting work with the Qs and the As flying around rapidly, when you’re the only one who understands every word.
So Tanaka made it simple. He said the Japanese word for “fastball,” and Horie repeated it. Same with “two seamer.”
And then:
“Curve.” “Curve,” Horie replied.
“Slider.” Horie: “Slider.”
“Cutter.” “Cutter.”
By now, the two men were smiling because they knew Horie was simply repeating, not interpreting, as they added “split” and “change-up.”
Pitching can really be a universal language. And what we saw from Tanaka in his brief stint against eight hitters was this: It’s going to be a lot of fun for those of us on this side of the white lines to watch Tanaka figure out how to cobble together those seven pitches.
It’s going to be less fun for hitters when they see his splitter — which he threw just three times — vanish into the dirt, and when they see a fastball that ticked 94 thrown precisely, as Tanaka did so often in his debut.
But it’s also going to be less than fun for Tanaka if his other off-speed pitches float and hang as they did Saturday, if he leaves them up in the zone for various and sundry Red Sox and Orioles and Tigers to take aim at; they aren’t as likely to be as accommodating as Kelly Dugan and Cesar Hernandez.
But that’s for another day, another month.
For now?
“I was just trying to locate my pitches where the catcher held his glove,” Tanaka said, his arm and shoulder red from being freshly iced, two innings and two hits and three strikeouts in the books. “I’m relieved to throw against batters over here.”
It was enough to impress his teammates.
“He was really cool,” said Francisco Cervelli, who caught him. “Good location. Able to make all of his pitches.”
“It was a fun buzz around the park,” added CC Sabathia, who made his own spring debut — as did Hiroki Kuroda — also with two scoreless innings. “It was cool.”
Sabathia had played catch with Tanaka a few days ago and his new teammate had sampled the splitter for him, just goofing around.
“Nasty,” Sabathia said, smiling.
If there’s one thing the Yankees need to concern themselves with when it comes to Tanaka, it’s allowing the hype and the hyperbole to provide the wrong narrative for what he is as a pitcher. That’s part of what hurt Daisuke Matsuzaka: He was billed a superhero, so even when he was an above-average to very-good major league pitcher, it never felt like enough.
Tanaka went 24-0 in Japan last year, and he is in the first few weeks of a $155 million contract with the Yankees.
Those are both numbers that can skew expectation in a hurry.
“I think people were eager to see him pitch,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “Guys on the team were eager to see him pitch.”
The novelty portion of this program will wear off slowly, for everybody. The Yankees need Tanaka to be good if they hope to make noise this summer. Tanaka needs to be good to ward off the remarkable pressure that will follow him around ballpark to ballpark. It is a marriage of mutual need.
“I was nervous,” he said, “but a good nervous.”
It was a start, a good start, a good place to be and a better place to begin. There’s work to be done. It’ll be fun to see what all that work yields.