In Japan, Yankees" Kuroda Was Molded by Pain As a boy, he sneaked away from an abusive high school coach to gulp water from a polluted river. He saw some of his teammates, desperate with thirst, drink from a puddle, and he heard of others who would do so from a toilet. Now, 20 years on, Hiroki Kuroda shook his head and actually laughed a little when recalling - and trying to explain - the hardships he endured as a boy trying to follow his father's footsteps and play professional baseball in Japan. "It was a generation," Kuroda said through an interpreter, "when coaches believed you should not drink water." Born in 1975, Kuroda is one of the last of a cohort of Japanese players who grew up in a culture in which staggeringly long work days and severe punishment were normal, and in which older players could haze younger ones with impunity. Summer practices in the heat and humidity of Osaka lasted from 6 a.m. until after 9 p.m. Kuroda was hit with bats and forced to kneel barelegged on hot pavement for hours. "Many players would faint in practice," Kuroda said with the assistance of his interpreter, Kenji Nimura. I did go to the river and drink. It was not the cleanest river, either. I would like to believe it was clean, but it was not a beautiful river. "In order to play," he added, "you had to survive. We were trained to build an immune system so that we could survive and play. Although never considered a top prospect, particularly by his high school and college coaches, Kuroda has come to be one of the most successful Japanese-born pitchers in baseball. His career earned run average of 3.41 is the lowest of any Japanese pitcher with more than 12 major league starts, and that includes the more-heralded Hideo Nomo, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish. On Friday, Kuroda, with a 3.17 E.R.A. and 8-7 record this season, will take the mound against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. The Yankees, hit with injuries, have effectively asked Kuroda to elevate his game to compensate for the suddenly absent starters Andy Pettitte and C. C. Sabathia. He seems, perhaps not surprisingly given his life story, undaunted. Jokingly asked if he could throw 200 pitches in a game if asked, Kuroda did not exactly dismiss the notion. "I am a human being, so of course I get tired," he said. But if someone asks me, I would probably do it because that is how I was taught. Everything happens for a reason, and maybe it helped me to get here now. Kuroda, reflecting for another moment on his ordeals as a child, then added, "But if none of it happened, I would have enjoyed baseball a lot more." One day in the summer of 1990, when Kuroda was 15 and playing summer baseball for his select high school, Uenomiya High, he had a bad outing, the latest in a string of them. Controlling the location of his pitches was a persistent problem, and even when he could throw strikes, opponents hit them hard, and to all fields. Before long, Kuroda's manager approached him and another offending teammate, a boy a year older, and issued them the dreaded order: Run. As usual, it was an open-ended command, and every player, particularly the struggling ones like the teenage Kuroda, knew the meaning: go to the outfield, and run from foul pole to foul pole - the longest part of any baseball field - without water. Kuroda changed out of his uniform and began a four-day ordeal that still haunts him and still fuels his desire to perform well - and not make mistakes. The story, as he tells it, sounds implausible. But Kuroda, over the course of five interview sessions, told it again and again, and insisted it was so. Under orders, he ran from 6 a.m. until 9 or 10 p.m., depending on when the coach went to bed. Obviously, he could not jog for 15 straight hours, but he had to do his best to make it look that way. When his coach, known as the kantoku, was not watching, he would walk. When the kantoku went to his office for lunch, Kuroda said, his teammates left water or a rice ball for him in the woods. "That water was the greatest tasting thing I have ever had," he said, "better than any five-star restaurant." At night, when the kantoku had retreated for the evening, Kuroda could at last stop running and would return to the dormitory. But he was not allowed to bathe.