It’s finally official. Masahiro Tanaka is no longer a Yankee. The right-hander announced that he has signed a contract with his old team the Rakuten Eagles.
Tanaka pitched seven seasons in pinstripes going 78-46 with a 3.74 ERA. During that span, his 18.9 WAR was the 19th highest in all of baseball among starters and his 1.13 WHIP was 18th best.
How about some more Tanaka stats? During his time in the majors, Tanaka led the league in percentage of unidentified pitches, throwing them 0.6 percent of the time per Fangraphs. He also threw the third-highest percentage of sinker/split-finger pitches at 26.7 percent, behind only Jorge De La Rosa (32.0 percent) and Matt Shoemaker (27.1 percent). Even with all of those splitters, his elbow bent but never broke. In 2014, Tanaka partially tore his UCL, something that could have easily led to Tommy John surgery. Instead, he rested his elbow for six weeks and he has been pitching ever since. And one could argue that he was one of the more effective and reliable pitchers in the league despite having that “ticking time bomb” as many described it. The man averaged over 150 innings pitched per year! He just wanted to go out and pitch his team to victory.
Above all, Tanaka was as close to a true “Yankee” as you can get. Besides Brett Gardner, Tanaka was the longest-tenured Yankee up until the end of last season. He has thrown the 33rd most innings of any Yankees starter in history. That’s no small feat given the team’s rich history. He’s also 22nd in WAR and 26th in wins.
Speaking of wins, Tanaka has been synonymous with winning his whole career, even in Japan. In his last season with Rakuten before coming to America, Tanaka went 24-0 during the regular season. Including the postseason, he was 30-1. And that one loss came in Game 6 of the Japan Series, where he simply threw a 160-pitch complete game. Oh yeah, and he came back the next game and got the save in the series-clinching game. During his press conference in February 2014, he stated that his top priority was to “win the world championship”. Unfortunately, Tanaka never got to play in the World Series, but he was known for being a big-game pitcher as a Yankee, having a 1.76 ERA in the postseason before 2020.
And I think any Tanaka appreciation post would be remiss if it didn’t note his intangibles. He always seemed like he was having fun. He was a great teammate and a good actor to boot. We got gems such as Tanaka and his bobblehead:
Him and Gary Sanchez deciding on lunch:
Him getting everyone “ready to go!”:
And of course, Masahiro Gardner:
There’s not much more you can say about Masahiro Tanaka. He was a warrior, a gamer, and above all a true Yankee. Thank you Masa, you’ll be missed.
