Hiroki Kuroda wants to play fair

PHILADELPHIA — Hiroki Kuroda said the memory doesn't upset him anymore.

But he said he still wonders: Why was he fined but not Brett Myers?

"I always found that curious," he said.

Today he will start Game 3 of the National League Championship Series against the Philadelphia Phillies -- just as he did one year ago.

In the third inning of that game a year ago, Kuroda threw what looked like retaliation for fastballs that Myers threw at the heads of Russell Martin and Manny Ramirez in the previous game, Kuroda sailed a pitch over the helmet of Shane Victorino. (To this day, Kuroda maintains that he "slipped.")

Kuroda was fined $7,500, Myers not a dime.

To get his answer, Kuroda and interpreter Kenji Nimura went to Major League Baseball's New York offices to appeal his fine when the Dodgers visited the Mets for a three-game series in July.

Kuroda didn't so much object to his fine as he did the absence of a punishment for Myers.

"We did the same thing," he said. "I don't see why we didn't receive the same punishment."

The answer?

"They said that if you looked at the footage of him after he made those throws, he licked his fingers," Kuroda said. "They said that was proof that he slipped."

Kuroda sighed and shrugged.

"There was nothing I could say," he said.

However, he did get the fine lowered to $5,000.

That sense of fairness is something Kuroda learned from his late mother, Yasuko, a school teacher who was a strict disciplinarian.

She molded him, he said, and it is because of her that he's the kind of person who would think, despite all that has happened, fortune is on his side this season.

Missing two months early in the year because of a strained side muscle or another three weeks after being hit in the head by a line drive Aug. 15 doesn't mean he was unlucky.

"If I were unlucky," he said, "I would have died."

Because of her, he said, he learned to deal with anything. If the fans in Philadelphia remember how he threw at Victorino and boo him, so be it.

"Better than pitching in a quiet stadium," he said.

That he hasn't pitched in three weeks thanks to a bulging disk in his neck -- which kept him sidelined during the Dodgers' sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals in the division series -- isn't a big deal either. He has had longer layoffs, he said.

Recalling his 2002 season playing for the Hiroshima Carp in Japan, he once went 40-odd days without pitching because of lower back problems.