No indicators point to Masahiro Tanaka being hurt, says Yankees’ Brian Cashman

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 that there’s nothing telling Cashman or his staff that there’s any reason to doubt the struggling righthander.

“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 the Stadium, where he was dressed in a full Spider-Man outfit as part of the Yankees’ “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 rained 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 5-3 record into Friday night that is misleading, given his 6.56 ERA.

Tanaka has allowed 14 runs, 16 hits (including seven homers) and four walks in 4 2⁄3 innings in his last two starts. He won the two starts before that to move to 5-1 but allowed 18 hits, including three home runs, and seven earned runs in 13 1⁄3 innings. In the start before that, however, he pitched a three-hit shutout against the Red Sox on April 27.

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 — he suffered a slight tear of his ulnar collateral ligament in 2014 and had 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 it 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 later said: “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 and posted a 3.06 ERA in five September 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.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.