Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched well against the Rays this season and the Sox are asking him to be the stopper tonight.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

BOSTON — Over the last three games, the Rays have feasted on crafty knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, knocked out stopper Jon Lester and ruined Josh Beckett’s reputation as a postseason ace. Only 18-game winner Daisuke Matsuzaka has dodged Tampa’s home-run binge. He held the Rays hitless for six innings in Game One en route to a 2-0 win.

The Rays, however, say Matsuzaka was the lucky one in Game One, and feel they were tantalizingly close to breaking the game open against the Japanese right-hander.

Of course, many teams have felt that way this season. Matsuzaka has a history of working out of trouble. His 92 walks in 167 innings are unusual numbers for an 18-game winner, and speak to his high pitch counts and propensity for putting runners on base.

Results aside, the Rays felt good enough about their four hits and four walks in the first game to say they won’t change their tactics in Game Five.

“You know what? I don’t think we change anything. We had our opportunities that game, and he pitched out of some jams,” said Rays center fielder B.J. Upton, who has scorched Red Sox pitching in this series. “I think we take the same approach, but capitalize on those situations a little more than we did.”

Matsuzaka, however, plans to vary his own approach somewhat, though he wouldn’t reveal exactly how.

“For me in the next game, even if I have to throw a lot of pitches, I’m going to do my best to throw to quality spots and keep them guessing and keep them off-balance, but I won’t be going into it [with] the exact same game plan as Game One,” he said through an interpreter.

In the first game, he tried to capitalize on the aggressiveness of the free-swinging Rays, who were second-worst in the American League in strikeouts this year. He struck out eight in Game One.

“The Rays’ lineup has a lot of aggressive hitters, and I wanted to take advantage of that in the last game. But in terms of attacking the strike zone and being aggressive again, that’s certainly something that I want to keep doing,” Matsuzaka said.

Rays left fielder Carl Crawford said the Matsuzaka they saw in Game One was not exactly the pitcher they’d faced all season.

“He was throwing harder than normal, with a two-seamer, and it was moving across the plate. At times, we thought pitches he was throwing were balls, and we go back and look at the tape, and they were strikes,” Crawford said.

Manager Terry Francona called that a sign of Matsuzaka’s skill when he’s pitching effectively.

“It sounds to me what Carl is alluding to is what all good pitchers do… they spread the plate out, because they’re giving you a couple different looks, and they’re locating, and the plate looks bigger than it is. That’s what good pitchers do,” Francona said.

As the cameras of Japanese media outlets clicked around him yesterday, Matsuzaka acknowledged that pitching games like tonight’s are why he was brought here. He has finally begun to deliver on that promise for the Red Sox, but he still needs to carry the Red Sox a few more times in important games before he earns the reputation that Beckett had held until recently.

“I’m not Beckett, but if I can pitch like he did last year and hand the ball off to the guys behind me, that would be great,” he said.

dbarbari@projo.com