MLB | The Sinker He Found in Columbus (Chien-Ming Wang's debut, original Yankee Stadium site)

Seven innings, six hits, two walks, two earned runs, and not one strikeout. That was Chien-Ming Wang's (王建民) first day in the major leagues, at the original Yankee Stadium on 30 April 2005 against Toronto, and it advertised nearly everything that came after.

Most retellings say he won it. He did not. New York beat the Blue Jays 4-3 on a Tony Womack single in the ninth, long after Wang had left; SABR's own essay on his career gives him the win, and the box score gives him a no-decision. The number that mattered in that line was the zero in the strikeout column.

Wang signed with the Yankees as an amateur free agent on 5 May 2000, which was 6 May in Taiwan, for a bonus Sports Illustrated reported as $1.9 million. He had been close to signing with Seattle. Taiwanese accounts usually give a slightly higher figure, around US$2.01 million, and the two have never been reconciled. He was twenty, and from Tainan. Fourteen starts into his professional career he tore the labrum in his throwing shoulder and lost the whole of 2001 to it.

The pitch that made him arrived at Triple-A Columbus in 2004: a sinker in the mid-90s that hitters could not lift. Andy Pettitte called it the best he had ever seen. It produced an odd sort of ace. Nineteen wins in 2006 and nineteen again in 2007, the first Yankee to do that since Tommy John in 1979-80, runner-up to Johan Santana in the 2006 American League Cy Young vote, and roughly three strikeouts per nine innings. Over the span from his debut to June 2008 he gave up fewer home runs per nine than anyone else in the majors, and only three pitchers in baseball got more ground balls per fly ball.

What happened in Taiwan was a different order of thing from what happened in New York. Wang was the third Taiwanese player and the second Taiwanese pitcher to reach the majors, after Chin-Feng Chen (陳金鋒) in 2002 and Chin-Hui Tsao (曹錦輝) in 2003, but he was the first to hold a rotation spot, and his starts went out live at three in the morning. Apple Daily claimed it sold up to 300,000 extra copies the day after he pitched.

Visiting. The ballpark is gone. Its last game was played on 21 September 2008, three months after Wang's season ended in Houston, and demolition finished in 2010. What occupies the footprint now is Heritage Field, inside Macombs Dam Park: free, open to the public, with the outline of the old diamond laid into the grass in blue turf and a section of the stadium's copper frieze preserved nearby. In 2020 the ballfield area was renamed Elston Howard Field. Cross 161st Street and you are at the current Yankee Stadium.

Cover: Chien-Ming Wang in Yankees road grey, photographed 29 July 2007. Photo: Keith Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the field after the final game at the original Yankee Stadium, 21 September 2008. Photo: Dvdkid919, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Coordinates mark the 1923 stadium footprint, now Heritage Field.