Nearly perfect and totally clueless
Wang retires first 22, but doesn't know it
BY ANTHONY McCARRON
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Sunday, May 6th 2007, 4:00 AM
Around the fifth inning, several Seattle Mariners thought they might
not get a hit all day, considering the way Chien-Ming Wang's sinker
was plunging through the strike zone. Over in the Yankee dugout,
Joe Torre began to take Wang's bid for a perfect game seriously
when Wang struck out Raul Ibanez to end the seventh after throwing
Ibanez three straight balls to begin the at-bat.
Around that time, the crowd of 51,702 started cheering every one of
Wang's pitches, wincing at the balls, screaming at the strikes and
urging him to rush one of baseball's most exclusive fraternities.
But on the mound, Wang was oblivious. He probably was the only
person at the Stadium yesterday who didn't realize he was
taking a perfect game into the eighth inning against a team
that had pummeled the Yankee pitching staff the night before.
Five outs from history, Wang's try at perfection crumbled. He had
not thrown a changeup all day, but he tried to fool Ben Broussard
with one, and the first baseman slammed it into the right-center
field seats.
Perfect game, no-hitter and shutout gone in the time it took for
a homer to soar over the fence, but the Yankees still got
something vital out of the day - the longest and perhaps
best outing by one of their starting pitchers this season.
Wang retired the first 22 batters he faced and became the first
member of the rotation to pitch into the eighth this season in
the Yanks' 8-1 victory over Seattle. Seven different Yankees
had RBI as the team won for the fourth time in five games,
beating ex-teammate Jeff Weaver.
Wang was the second Yankee in less than a week to take a no-hitter
deep into a game - Phil Hughes threw 6-2/3 no-hit innings against
the Rangers last week before leaving with a hamstring injury.
Wang finished the eighth after Broussard's homer, allowing one more
hit, and left the mound to a standing ovation. Teammates and coaches
crowded around him in the dugout when he arrived and that's when he
found out he had been nearly flawless.
"Posada told me," Wang said. Did he feel like he had no-hit stuff? "
No," Wang replied.
He was probably the only one who believed that, though. "The way he
was throwing, there wasn't a whole lot over the middle of the plate,"
Seattle's Willie Bloomquist said.
Bloomquist said Wang's sinker, which usually comes in at around
93 or 94 miles per hour, is "deceptive when you are up there.
"It looks like it is going to be over the center of the plate
and (there is) late movement and (it) kind of gets in on you,
jams you. As far as a no-hitter, you never like to think you
are going to get no-hit, but he was throwing some pretty good
stuff up there. We were hoping someone was gonna get him sooner
or later."
Brian Bruney pitched a scoreless ninth, which meant that the Yankees
had used less than three pitchers in a game for the first time
this season. After the staff gave up 15 runs to Seattle on Friday,
Wang's outing was a relief to Torre and the beleaguered bullpen,
especially with rookies Darrell Rasner and Matt DeSalvo starting
today and tomorrow, respectively.
"He gave us a big lift," Torre said. Wang thrives on getting batters
to pound his sinker into the dirt - 14 of the 24 outs he got yesterday
were on ground balls - and since he doesn't strike out many hitters,
Torre said he isn't the prototypical pitcher "you'd think would throw
a no-hitter."
Wang struck out four yesterday and walked none, throwing 65 of his
103 pitches for strikes.
Not bad for a guy who wasn't cleared to make yesterday's start until
he successfully completed a bullpen session on Wednesday. He had split
a fingernail on his pitching hand during his last start, and the
manager worried that another pitching emergency was blooming.
"That would've been a big hole for us," Torre said. "He's been so big
for us since he's been here."
The game was tense until the sixth, with the Yankees holding only a
1-0 lead. They scored five times to knock out Weaver - a rally started,
of all things, by Bobby Abreu's bunt single - leaving Wang's attempt
at perfection as the only drama. Torre said he was curious to see how
the staid Wang would've handled a perfecto.
"He may have jogged off the mound or something instead of walked,"
Torre said with a laugh.
Three other Yankee pitchers - Don Larsen, David Wells and David Cone -
have pitched perfect games and there have been just 17 in history.
Wang said he wasn't disappointed he didn't join them.
How could he be? He didn't even know he had gotten close until he was
done pitching.
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