The strange thing about Hiroki Kuroda’s no-hit bid Tuesday night was that while the Rangers went six innings without a hit the Yankees went just as long without a point. The teams that are 1-2 in runs scored in the American League (Texas 580, Yanks 577) were scoreless through the sixth.

So for all of his brilliance, Kuroda was always one pitch from disaster. Rangers lefthander Matt Harrison matched Kuroda with zeroes in the runs column if not the hits column. The Yankees had four hits off Harrison through six but were unable to score.

Texas ended Kuroda’s dream when Elvis Andrus led off the seventh with an infield single. A lot of Yankees fans will probably argue whether Derek Jeter would have been able to do what Jayson Nix could not, which was to throw out Andrus at first base after making a diving stop. My take is that it did not matter who was playing shortstop. Andruw was going to beat the play. Jeter would have also had to leave his feet to prevent Andrus’ ball from going through the infield as Nix did. But once on the ground, a shortstop would have scant chance to throw Andrus out. It was a pretty clean single in my view.

Kuroda and the Yankees should send a thank-you note to Rangers manager Ron Washington for helping them finally put some numbers on the board in the seventh inning. Washington removed Harrison from the game after he gave up a one-out single to Jeter, who was the designated hitter, in the seventh.

The manager knows his personnel better than I do. Perhaps Harrison was fried after throwing 106 pitches. That really isn’t the point. What is the point is bringing in a righthander, Alexi Ogando, to face switch-hitting Nick Swisher, turning him around to the left side and taking aim at Yankee Stadium’s tempting right field porch. Washington paid for it, too, because Swisher ended up hitting a two-run home run, one night after he belted a grand slam, also batting left-handed, that buried Texas.

Swisher’s numbers this year are decidedly one-sided. He is batting .271 with 13 home runs and 52 RBI as a left-handed hitter and .250 with three home runs and 13 RBI as a right-handed hitter. Swish had a great at-bat as well. He fought off some high-octane gas (Ogando’s fastball ranged from 95 to 99 miles per hour), took a nasty 2-2 slider just off the plate to run the count full before he caught up with a 98-mph heater for his 16th home run.

“I wanted to put velocity on Swisher,” Washington said. “I think the ball that Swish hit was eye-level, but he caught it. He saw so many fastballs in that at-bat that he finally timed one.”

Ogando had barely recovered from that when Mark Teixeira also went deep for his 25th home run.

That was all Kuroda needed, and he has often needed better run support this year. He is 11-8 with a 3.06 ERA, but Yankees manager Joe Girardi said that with better run support Kuroda “could have 15 or 16” victories by now. Two starts ago, he pitched brilliantly for 6 1/3 innings allowing one run and seven hits but ran into a buzz-saw named Felix Hernandez, who pitched a two-hit shutout. This time, Kuroda was the buzz-saw. This time, he pitched the two-hit shutout.

“This is a very great lineup he shut down,” Girardi said, referring to the Rangers, who lead the AL in batting with a .278 average. “It was probably our best pitching performance of the year.”

Kuroda threw 21 first-pitch strikes, using sinkers and sliders to get ahead in the count and then resorting to a devastating splitter to finish off hitters, particularly left-handed ones. Some of the Rangers’ swings against Kuroda’s nasty stuff were downright ugly.

During his time with the Dodgers, Kuroda pitched a one-hit shutout against the Braves, losing the no-no on a hit by Teixeira. Asked to compare the two games, Kuroda told WCBS radio’s Suzyn Waldman that Tuesday night’s game was bigger because the Texas lineup was far more muscular. He also told Suzyn that “the best is yet to come.”

That should be music to the Yankees’ ears.