Coming up big not foreign to Matsui

It isn't as though Hideki Matsui hasn't been in the middle of a baseball blood rivalry before. In Japan, the clan war between the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers has been going on for decades. It's just as lopsided (30 Central League titles for the Giants, 4 for the Tigers) and it even has its own curse.

After Hanshin won the 1985 title, someone threw a statue of Colonel Sanders, stolen from the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, into the river. Until it's found, the Curse of the Colonel says, the Tigers never will win the Series again.

But the Yankees and Red Sox, said the man who's lived through both rivalries, are in another dimension. "Certainly, the Giants-Tigers rivalry has a lot of history behind it," said Matsui, who led the Giants to four Series crowns before decamping for the Bronx. "But you feel that even more so here, with the fans and media. There is so much more hype surrounding it."

Godzilla has been a Yankee for just two years, but he's already written himself into the lore. Last October, he was a big part of the Yankees' eighth-inning rally in Game 7 against the Sox, cranking a ground-rule double off Pedro Martinez and coming around to score the tying run that sent the ace to the showers and Sox manager Grady Little to the unemployment line.

This year, Matsui cranked five RBIs (all of them necessary) in Game 1. And last night, he had a monster mash of a game, going 5 for 6 with two homers, two doubles and five more RBIs, to raise his series average to .600. Was it his best night ever?

"It might be possible," Matsui said through interpreter Roger Kahlon. "I'm not sure, but maybe. A couple of years from now when I look back, it may be so."

On a ball club whose tradition is that you earn your pinstripes in October, the man from Japan already has done it twice over.

"He's cool under pressure, and I think that's probably the most important ingredient," said Yankees manager Joe Torre. "We all know he's talented, we all know he's strong. He never gives away an at-bat. As evidence, we have this big lead and he has a two-run homer his last time up."

If Matsui has made a remarkably quick adjustment to the pressure and the limelight that comes with being a Yankee star, it may be that he was already a cult figure before he ever went to work for the Steinbrenner AC.

"I don't know if I look at it as preparing me for this stage," Matsui said. "But the experiences I went through the whole time I was in Japan may have contributed to my being comfortable here."

Matsui was larger than life as a teenager, when he was so feared as a slugger that he was intentionally walked five times in a national high school playoff game. He was a nine-time All-Star and three-time league MVP with the Giants. When Matsui came to the Yankees, dozens of Japanese journalists came with him to chronicle each at-bat.

"We went over there in March and April and he was like a rock star," said Torre, who found himself something of a cult figure, too, when he was on vacation in Hawaii, because he was Matsui's skipper.

"I would be walking somewhere and a group of people would walk by speaking Japanese and all of a sudden I would hear `Joe Torre,' " he said. "People would come over to me and thank me for taking care of Matsui and stuff."

If he could handle the squeeze of playing 1,250 consecutive games for the most storied team in Japan (and at 6 feet 2 inches, 210 pounds, he literally was head and shoulders above his rivals), Matsui could handle life as a Yankee.

"Sure, it's different," said Torre. "This is major league baseball and the US and it's a bigger stage and all that stuff. But he seems to have conditioned himself to handle the game."

Performing every day -- as in 325 straight games in New York -- hasn't hurt. Language and culture aside, the biggest adjustment for Matsui has been learning to play baseball in the land that invented it. "Just getting used to the game here, knowing the pitchers, getting more comfortable," he said. "That's the biggest factor."

Not that his initiation was easy, even after Matsui hit a grand slam in his first game. When his numbers slumped, owner George Steinbrenner carped that he wasn't hitting enough homers (16 for his first season). But Matsui knew he hadn't left his skills on the far side of the Pacific.

"He wasn't really distressed by it, other than his pride probably took a little bit of a beating," Torre said. "But he still had a lot of confidence in what he felt he had to do."

By now, Matsui is a fixture in left field (where the Yankees had had 11 different Opening Day starters since 1991) and in the heart of the lineup, where he's batting cleanup. He is not surprised about that, he said, but he is thankful.

"It's a privilege to be able to play every day, to be able to contribute," Matsui said. "As long as there is a game going on, I would like to be there."