Ichiro Suzuki Homers Twice, Helps Yankees Beat Red Sox 4-1

Ichiro Suzuki homered twice in his first Yankee Stadium curtain call Sunday night, helping the Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 4-1.

The second shot off right-hander Josh Beckett marked the seventh time Suzuki has hit more than one homerun in a game during his career — and the second in 2012, reports Yahoo! Sports.

After the game, Ichiro spoke about the game through his interpreter, saying:

“It just felt so good. Sometimes you just don’t know how to react when I’m on the field, the timing of when to acknowledge it, but it definitely felt good.”

The former Mariners player, who was traded to the Yankees just last month, went on to say:

“Obviously you always have a game plan against a certain pitcher, but I think everybody was just focused on this game. It’s a very important game, obviously, the rivalry… So you could just say that everybody was just focused.”

Adrian Gonzalez, the Red Sox first baseman, scored the team’s only run when he hit a solo homer off Hiroki Kuroda in the seventh inning. For the Yankees, Fox Sports notes that Derek Jeter pulled in the other two runs of the game, helping the club take two of the three games against the Red Sox, despite playing the whole series without slugger Mark Teixeira.

Ichiro Suzuki also took a massive swing in the eighth inning, prompting questions that he was attempting for a third home run of the game. When asked by reporters, the right fielder just winked. Yankees manager Joe Girardi stated of Ichiro that:

”I think he’s probably hit to his ballpark, in a sense, all those years. Seattle plays extremely large and if he had been a Yankee for a number of years, who knows how many he might have hit? But we know that there’s power there.”