Not only did the Yankees win yesterday, Chien-Ming Wang came close to pitching a perfect game:
Chien-Ming Wang of Tainan, Taiwan, is a talented and polite Yankees pitcher who has little to say in two languages. But Wang came close to giving the baseball world and 51,702 witnesses something special to talk about yesterday at Yankee Stadium.
In an 8-1 victory against the Seattle Mariners, Wang carried a perfect game into the eighth inning. With one out, Ben Broussard hit the ball over the right-field fence for a home run that also spoiled Wang’s no-hitter and his shutout.
After the game, in a series of short and soft answers, Wang kept smiling and insisting through an interpreter that he had no idea that he had been five outs from perfection until he finished the inning by giving up a single and getting a double-play grounder, then walking off to a standing ovation.
When Wang reached the dugout, he said, he answered questions from catcher Jorge Posada and all the other players who came up to him and wanted to know what happened.
What happened, Posada said, was an 0-1 changeup that Posada called for the first time in the game. Wang left the pitch too high to Broussard, a left-handed hitter, who pulled it hard.
“I’ll think about it,” Posada said of the pitch. “You never second-guess yourself. But, after it happens, you do.”
While it’s disappointing that Wang didn’t go all the way with the no-hitter, it’s still a win. Moreover, Peter Abraham points out the reason this really was an extraordinary outing on his part:
To give some perspective to what Chien-Ming Wang accomplished today, you have to understand that he throws only three pitches: a two-seam sinking fastball (75 percent of the time), a four-seam fastball and an occasional slider.
His intent is to pitch to contact. He wants opposing hitters to chase his two-sinker and ground into outs. This strategy is an excellent one but it invariably leads to assorted singles because hard grounders get past infielders.
To be perfect for 7.1 innings is a real testament to how much his ball was moving today.
More importantly, it means Wang is back to normal and that’s only good news.
