Word: hideki
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Yankees 9, Royals 8 KANSAS CITY, Mo.-If Hideki Irabu is going to pitch like this, Rodger Clemens had better get well in a hurry...
...Yankees won their championship on Wednesday night, awkwardly called them "a great team team." They were. Every single player contributed, big time. While most good teams have three solid starting pitchers and a rotating journeyman, the Yankees had six great starters: David Wells, David Cone, Andy Pettitte, Orlando Hernandez, Hideki Irabu and Ramiro Mendoza. Their bench could have beaten other teams. The Yankees, in contrast to the attention-grabbing McGwire-Sosa home run race, got wins and bad Nielsen ratings by playing "small ball": by massaging the first run over the plate, and then another and another. Batters patiently waited...
...Steinbrenner deserves almost no credit for such ruthless (and Mantle-less) efficiency. This team is the brainchild of now departed general manager Bob Watson and has been gracefully deployed by its manager, the modest Joe Torre. It's been assembled from a veritable spare-parts bin of players: Hideki Irabu from Japan, Cuban emigre Orlando Hernandez, a few from trades and the free-agent rolls. Perhaps most remarkable is the provenance of Jeter, Williams and starting pitcher Andy Pettitte: Each came from the once suspect Yankees farm system...
...Hideki Irabu, Yankee star...
Examples of a close association between sports and city abound--Broadway Joe Namath uses his big-city playboy image to this day; Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma kid who made it big on America's biggest stage came straight out of a Horatio Alger novel; Hideki Irabu's introduction to New York was Derek Jeter giving him a tour of the Chinatown club scene; and let us not forget the New York Knicks, the lovable bullies of the NBA--the civic myth of New York lives a charmed life within its sports scene...