Heading into the ALCS, there were some understandable concerns with the Yankees starting Masahiro Tanaka in Game 1.
Within a hostile environment at Minute Maid Park in Houston against the Astros — who led Major League Baseball with 107 wins in 2019 — Tanaka was anything but a reliable pitcher on the road this season.
In 16 outings (15 starts), the 30-year-old was 3-6 with a 6.05 ERA and 1.416 ERA.
At surface level, that was a recipe for disaster against an Astros team that boasts one of the deepest lineups in baseball, ranging from Jose Altuve to George Springer, to Carlos Correa, to AL MVP contender Alex Bregman.
What plenty of us forgot to realize — which now continues to become more obvious following Saturday night’s Game 1 7-0 Yankees victory — is that Masahiro Tanaka is becoming one of the greatest postseason pitchers in MLB history.
Tanaka was masterful in Game 1, allowing just a single hit in six innings of work while facing the minimum against that loaded Astros lineup.
It took him just 68 pitches to get through those 18 outs before manager Aaron Boone opted to lift him for a bullpen that allowed just two hits in the final three innings. He became the first pitcher since Greg Maddux in the 2002 NLDS to throw 68 or fewer pitches over six full innings in a postseason start.
His untouchable stuff gave the Yankees offense plenty of time to figure out Zack Greinke, as Gleyber Torres got the Bronx Bombers on the board in the fourth inning and never looked back on his way to a five-RBI night.
“That’s probably the best that we’ve seen him in a small sample to execute his game plan, his pitches, his tempo,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said when asked about Tanaka. “Just about everything was working for him. We couldn’t create a ton of traffic for him. … He was just really, really good tonight.”
His side certainly wasn’t the first to be stymied by Tanaka in the postseason. Following Saturday night’s gem, Tanaka is now 5-2 in the postseason with a 1.32 ERA and 0.73 WHIP in 41 innings of work.
That’s one of the best stat lines we’ve seen over the past 100 years when it comes to the postseason.
Since the end of the Deadball era (1920), Sandy Koufax and Christy Mathewson are the only pitchers with at least 40 innings of postseason work to have a better ERA than Tanaka’s.
Just think of some of the best postseason pitchers over the past 30 years: Madison Bumgarner, John Smoltz, Andy Pettitte, Curt Schilling. Tanaka’s numbers are far superior — albeit in a smaller sample size.
He’s bound to get that innings-pitched number up some more this postseason, though. With must-win games on the immediate horizon, Tanaka is going to be a go-to guy for Boone as the stakes get higher.
