Yu Darvish: Texas Rangers Ace Keeps Proving He's for Real

Okay, anybody who's not taking Yu Darvish seriously needs to start doing so.

Now.

Darvish's fifth start for the Texas Rangers on Tuesday was yet another good one. He went seven innings against the Toronto Blue Jays, giving up one run on four hits and two walks. He struck out nine.

There were two blemishes for Darvish on Tuesday. He hit Edwin Encarnacion with a high, inside fastball early in the game, and Encarnacion repaid him by hitting a solo home run in the fourth inning. It was a real "welcome to the show, meat" moment.

Aside from that, Darvish was tremendous. Again.

This makes it three straight starts for Darvish in which he's lasted at least six innings and given up one run or fewer. Just as important, he didn't look out of sorts after throwing 8.1 innings and 119 pitches in his last start against the New York Yankees, the longest of his brief career.

Darvish is settling into a groove, and you can tell by how flabbergasted very good hitters have looked against him in his last two starts. Darvish has tamed the Yankees and Blue Jays like they were, say, the Oakland Athletics and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The most amazing thing about Darvish's last two starts, I think, is how many swings and misses he's gotten. Per Baseball-Reference.com, 15 of his 82 strikes against the Yankees were swinging strikes, roughly 18 percent.

Against the Blue Jays, 14 of Darvish's 62 strikes were swinging strikes. That's about 23 percent. Speaking of whiffing, his highlight reel from tonight will make your jaw drop.

A fluke? No. Darvish's fastball command comes and goes, but in an odd way, that works to his advantage. When the ball leaves his hand, hitters have no clue where the ball is going, and the wicked movement of Darvish's pitches puts hitters at an even bigger disadvantage. With him, it's not so much about using the strike zone to get ahead of hitters. It's about using the strike zone to tease hitters.

One's first instinct is to be skeptical about how long this can last. Darvish will surely come back down to earth once the league's hitters get a chance to study up and realize how they have to approach him. Eventually, he'll go the same way as Daisuke Matsuzaka.

Except not. Darvish started slow and has gotten progressively better with each start. The league's hitters aren't figuring him out. He's figuring out the league's hitters. It helps that the jitters that plagued him during his first start have disappeared.

Dice-K, as you may recall, trended in the exact opposite direction in his first season. He started strong with seven innings of one-run ball with 10 strikeouts in his first big-league start against the Kansas City Royals. In the four starts that came after, his ERA rose to 2.57, 2.70, 4.00 and then 4.36. By the end of May, it was 4.83.

And for the record, he didn't get nearly as many swinging strikes as Darvish is getting now. Per Baseball-Reference.com, just 10 percent of his strikes in his first five starts came on swings and misses. Darvish is well ahead of that pace by now. 

The key difference between Darvish and Dice-K? Darvish's stuff looks just as nasty in the majors as it did back in Japan. Nothing has been lost in translation, so to speak, and that's something that cannot be said about Dice-K.

It's never a good idea to get excited about five starts, but I, for one, have seen enough to convince me of one thing:

Yu Darvish is nasty.

At this point, the rest of the American League has also figured this out. Exactly what the league's hitters are going to do to deal with it is beyond me. 

 

Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1167520-yu-darvish-rangers-ace-keeps-proving-hes-for-real

Jamie Lundmark Nick Spaling Pikka Rinne Mathieu Carle Lars Eller Hal Gill