BOSTON — You watched the Yankees, wearing ultra-cool throwback uniforms for Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary, put on an anachronistic laser show yesterday.
Five home runs. Wow! Back in 1912, it could take a team a month to hit five home runs. Walking uphill through the snow, no less.
Yet if you’re a Yankees fan, you watched your team thump the last-place Red Sox, 6-2, ruining their festive day, and then you had to think of the pitching.
As in, where would your team be without Ivan Nova?
“If you ask me, ‘Who’s the best pitcher in the world?’ I say me,” said Nova, who picked up his third win in three starts this season. “You have to believe it. That’s why you win so many games. Every time you get a chance, that’s what I go for.”
“He’s a monster,” Alex Rodriguez said. “I don’t know when people are going to realize that. Four-plus pitches above major league average. He is turning the corner.”
Nova said he couldn’t remember his last loss; that would be the season-ending 2011 American League Division Series Game 5. In the regular season, however, he lost to the Angels last June 3 and has made 19 starts since without picking up a loss.
We’re not much for win-loss records here; they reflect a pitcher’s run support as much as his actual performance, and Nova enjoys plenty of run support. Right now, however, you can say this: The undefeated Nova unquestionably has been the Yankees’ best starting pitcher in this young season, lowering his ERA to 3.79 yesterday as he allowed two runs and seven hits in six innings, striking out five and walking none.
That’s especially notable because: 1) Most industry folks expected him to regress after last year’s successful rookie season; 2) Nova endured a lousy Spring Training; and 3) All of his teammates in the starting rotation have struggled.
Yes, in a starting rotation filled with interesting characters and cool back stories, Nova is unheralded, underpaid and maybe even unappreciated.
Think about the people in the mix here. You’ve got the ace CC Sabathia, the high-priced rental Hiroki Kuroda, Mr. Upside Phil Hughes and the tested, gritty veteran Freddy Garcia. In reserve are the returning legend Andy Pettitte and the new stud Michael Pineda.
Nova? He’s the international free agent, signed back in 2004 for $80,000 — “not a lot,” Nova noted yesterday — who leapfrogged over the bigger names and livelier arms to carve an important part in last year’s starting rotation. And who nevertheless had to reprove himself in 2012.
His 8.06 Grapefruit League ERA, in the context of the Yankees’ starting rotation competition, forced people to wonder whether Nova would start the season at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Pineda’s right shoulder injury eliminated that question, and now, you see what a mistake that would have been.
“I said in Spring Training, Spring Training is Spring Training,” Nova said. “I was working on my pitches — change-up, curveball, slider — and you see the way they are now.”
All five of Nova’s strikeouts against the Red Sox came on his curveball.
Manager Joe Girardi credited the development of Nova’s slider as paramount to these ridiculous numbers so far: 20 strikeouts and two walks in 19 innings.
“You hope these guys go on [and] as they get older their control improves. I think that’s what you’re seeing,” Girardi said. “Maybe they become more familiar with their bodies.”
The statistical-analysis crowd (full disclosure: I am part of the statistical-analysis crowd) pegged Nova for a downturn this year, because he didn’t miss a great deal of bats and his .283 batting average against on balls in play seemed a little low. Good luck, in other words, seemed to contribute to that 16-4 record.
Yet at 25, Nova might just have the stuff, the confidence and the physical fitness to defy those projections. To remain a crucial part of this otherwise underachieving Yankees rotation.
This might have been a day for the Red Sox to honor their past. On the visitors’ side, though? It was a day to get excited about their future.