Daisuke Matsuzaka turned out to be the second-best international pitching sensation on display at Fenway last evening.
For weeks and weeks and weeks, it was Dice-K, Dice-K, Dice-K, and when it wasn't that, it was Dice-K/Ichiro, Dice-K/Ichiro, Dice-K/Ichiro. You'd have thought the Red Sox would be batting against an Iron Mike or something.
As far as the average Red Sox fan was concerned, Felix Hernandez wasn't just flying under the radar, he was crawling in a tunnel.
"Flying under the radar?" said Terry Francona before the game. "Not for me. He has some of the most explosive stuff in the game."
One game after battering the rusty Seattle Mariners for 14 hits and 14 runs, the Red Sox could do next to nothing against the young pitcher many in baseball consider the Next Great Thing. No, really. Hernandez threw a one-hitter as the Mariners defeated Matsuzaka and the Sox, 3-0, before a mammoth Fenway gathering of 36,630.
"I was banking on it," declared Seattle skipper Mike Hargrove. "I was thinking about it all day long. All that stuff about Ichiro and Matsuzaka, which I understand, but I really wasn't going to be surprised if Felix stole the show."
Here is the early-season body of work:
17 innings pitched, 4 hits, 0 runs, 0 earned runs, 5 walks and 18 strikeouts.
His ERA, for the mathematically challenged, is 0.00.
The Oakland A's were victimized first. Hernandez put them in an Opening Day torture chamber, allowing three hits and no runs while striking out 12 in eight innings. The best starting pitching performance of the early season? Without doubt. Until last night's, that is.
Hernandez was the first Opening Day starter to fan 12 without allowing a run since Bob Gibson in 1967. And Hernandez was only the fourth pitcher since 1900 under the age of 21 to start and win an Opening Day game, the others being Chief Bender (1905), Bob Feller (1939), and Fernando Valenzuela (1981). Hang on, I've got one more for you. In the last 15 years, only two pitchers under the age of 21 have thrown a complete-game shutout. The first was Kerry Wood. The second was Hernandez, who shut out the Angels on five hits last Aug. 28 in a tidy 1 hour 51 minutes, the shortest game in Safeco Field history.
"His stuff's as good as anyone's that I've ever seen," maintained Hargrove.
If his first start of the '07 season was sensational, what do we call last night's? Sublime?
Hernandez, who turned 21 Sunday, is an imposing figure on the mound at 6 feet 3 inches and a listed 230 pounds. "I think he's lost some of that baby-soft fat he used to have," Hargrove said. "That's good to see."
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