Igawa proves surprise in relief

NEW YORK -- The first thoughts that flashed through manager Joe Torre's mind as he walked from the dugout to where Jeff Karstens lay prone on the grass by the mound were some seemingly innocuous words he had uttered in his pregame session with the media.

To wit: You never know when your pitcher will get hit by a line drive.

"My mom taught me to knock on wood," Torre said, much more relaxed after a game the Yankees won, 3-1, to break a four-game losing streak to the Red Sox this season, but a game in which Karstens broke his fibula after being hit by a batted ball in the first inning. "I didn't do that. Yeah, I thought of that when I was going out to the mound. Fortunately, it worked for us."

With a beleaguered relief staff that is on track to break records for appearances in a season and a starting rotation that loses pitchers seemingly by the day, there was really only one pitcher for Torre to bring into the game at that point: Kei Igawa, the player who originally was slated to start this game. Except, having given up seven earned runs in two of his last four starts, Igawa had been skipped in favor of Karstens.

But after his effort yesterday, after six innings of two-hit relief, Igawa was back.

Igawa demonstrated he wasn't a $46 million Triple A pitcher ($26 million in a posting fee to bring him over from Japan; $20 million in salary). Though Torre emphasized the team had not gotten to that point with Igawa, he did admit had the pitcher continued to struggle, it would have been a possibility.

Not anymore.

"He has taken to the stuff that Ron [Guidry] has talked to him about," Torre said. "It's not like, 'Hey, I'm a starter. I don't need anything like this.' He has bought into and understands that he's pitching in a different place and there are certain things -- you have to get into a routine here. Just the mechanics of repeating your pitches, I think that's what he's working like hell to grab onto."

Pitching seemingly exclusively out of the stretch -- the question of whether he threw at all from the windup got lost in translation through his interpreter -- Igawa spun a beauty of an outing, starting off well with a fastball that induced the first batter he faced, David Ortiz, to hit into a double play to erase one of the two runners left on by Karstens.

"We had a little [pitching] meeting before the game," Igawa said. "We all agreed to be more aggressive on the pitching. What I did was to attack the batter and get the first called strike."

Although Igawa said he wasn't trying to prove to the Yankees that he belonged in the rotation, or that he could pitch in the United States, that is exactly what he did. He took the recommendations and advice of pitching coach Guidry, working on his approach and, in the end, deciding to spend his outing in the stretch, which he said he wasn't sure he would continue in his next start, given the difficulty of pitching a starter's number of innings that way.

Even so, it worked yesterday.

"My mechanics weren't great last outing," Igawa said. "So my thought process was to be in the bullpen and feel refreshed, just relax.

"A long time ago, when I came out in relief in Japan, that's what I did was [pitch] out of the stretch. I feel like I have better control of the ball from the stretch."

Few things had been going right for the Yankees, who were mired in a seven-game losing streak that had them at the bottom of the American League East. And the disappointment filtered down, even through the language barrier.

"I felt the surrounding," Igawa said. "It's been negative the last seven days. I did my best today to help this team move forward."

He did help his team move forward. And Igawa's stint could be the spark the Yankees need.

You just never know, like when a pitcher gets hit by a line drive.

"This could be a big turning point," Jason Giambi said, "for him and for us."

Amalie Benjamin can be reached at abenjamin@globe.com.