Hiroki Kuroda said he felt lost.
He didn't know why he was getting hit and he didn't know whether he could make it stop. He didn't know whether he would ever be able to repay the Dodgers for the three-year, $35.3-million deal he received or whether he would even remain in their rotation.
"I felt like I had to do something," he said. "I felt like I couldn't go home."
The San Francisco Giants had just battered him for seven runs in 3 2/3 innings and Kuroda felt he needed punishment of sorts as a kind of therapy.
So he did what he always did whenever he was angry with himself in Japan.
He ran.
Back and forth, Kuroda sprinted across the outfield at Dodger Stadium, which was vacant except for the nighttime cleaning crew and reporters in the press box.
Since then, he has posted a 2-0 record and 1.21 earned-run average in three starts. But going into his start tonight against the Colorado Rockies, Kuroda, 33, said he remains insecure.
And not only because he's still acclimating to a new country, playing in a new league and trying to learn a new language.
For the first time, Kuroda is pitching without his father in the background. A year ago, Kuroda's father died of lung cancer.
"This is my first season without him," said Kuroda, who has a 7-8 record and 3.88 ERA. "I used to always talk to him after games. That's gone for the first time and I'm playing in the United States for the first time. In that sense, I feel like I'm playing a different kind of baseball."
His father, Kazuhiro, played professionally in Japan for eight seasons, mostly as an outfielder, and later became a youth coach.
Kuroda said his father told him not to bother with baseball when, as a first grader, he said he and a friend wanted to start playing.
"I probably gave him the impression that I wanted to play for the sake of playing," he said. "He told me to not play if I wasn't going to take it seriously."
Kuroda said he would -- and he did.
In Japan, baseball is as much a spiritual exercise as it is a sport -- or at least it was when Kuroda was growing up. He said it was common for him to be hit by his high school and college coaches. When practicing in the summer heat, he wasn't allowed to drink water because it was believed that doing so would weaken the spirit.
"If something like that happened now, it'd probably be a problem," Kuroda said, laughing. "But in my times, that was common."
