It's not that Brian Cashman completely trusts Masahiro Tanaka when the pitcher says there's nothing wrong with him physically.
The Yankees' general manager knows athletes aren't always forthright when it comes to that kind of thing.
It's just, Cashman said, there's nothing telling him, or his staff, there's any reason to doubt the struggling right-hander.
"We've done 'CSI the Bronx' on him a number of different times where we've gone through the analytics comparisons to when he's flying high vs. the current low and there's no indicators (of injury)," Cashman said Thursday morning at Yankee Stadium where he was dressed in a full Spider-Man outfit as part of a "A Moment of Magic" Hope Week event for children. "His splitter's not splitting like it usually does and the command of the fastball's off. But in terms of velocity, even swings and misses in the zone, a lot of the background statistics that we study to try and measure certain things, none of them are of any alarming natures that are off."
Tanaka, who will start Friday night against the A's after his scheduled start Thursday afternoon was washed out, has been mostly a train wreck this season. The 28-year-old is enduring by far his worst stretch as a Yankee, toting a misleading 5-3 record into Friday given his 6.56 ERA. Tanaka has allowed 14 runs and 16 hits, including seven homers, over his last two starts comprising 42/3 innings.
Cashman said of sending Tanaka into an MRI tube: "You only go to those extreme steps if there's a reason to do so."
Tanaka's past _ suffering a slight tear of his ulnar collateral ligament in 2014 and undergoing surgery to remove a bone spur after the 2015 season _ isn't enough to order up tests.
"His velo (velocity) is right in line if not a tick better than what is normally," Cashman said. "I know the player doesn't feel that he's hurting, I know the pitching coach (Larry Rothschild) doesn't feel it's injury related either. And again from the analytics standpoint and the front office perspective, we can't seem to come up with some reason that would lead us to take that step. We're not afraid to do it if we felt it was necessary but we're not going to do something that appears to be unnecessary."
He added later: "I've been trained over time that you need to go through the process of engaging the athlete to determine what they are saying but you can't always trust what they're saying. That's why you have all the other avenues to pursue."
Cashman acknowledged that Tanaka didn't come forward about feeling some discomfort in his elbow in the latter part of 2015 until after that season, but there was no reason to suspect a problem. Tanaka went 15-9 with a 3.51 ERA that year, which included posting a 3.06 ERA in September over five starts.
"He was performing," Cashman said.
Tanaka clearly is not now but, again, there's nothing pointing to those struggles as being anything other than merit based.
"From the 'CSI the Bronx' side of it, if some of those boxes were being checked off as, hey, there's maybe a red flag, an anomaly here that we need to pursue (we would) but that hasn't been the case," Cashman said. "The bottom line is those other teams are doing damage against him but there's no indicator of an injury."
