Something I have been saying for a while now......
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For the same two minutes every game, Yu Darvish is an awful pitcher
Sam Miller
ESPN.com
In the first inning Saturday night, Angels leadoff man Yunel Escobar dug into the batter's box and stared out at a starting pitcher who has been, in his career, one of the worst in the game. Escobar took a fastball far outside, fouled off a center-cut fastball, then took three more balls. He jogged to first with a walk, and the Angels had a first-inning rally.
Moments later, the No. 2 hitter, Kole Calhoun, dug into the batter's box and stared out at a starting pitcher who has been, in his career, one of the game's very best. Same guy, actually, but if you believe the statistical record, those few seconds made all the difference in the world. Yu Darvish got Calhoun to fly out. Then he struck out Mike Trout for the first of 10 K's in six innings of mostly dominant pitching. Darvish and the Rangers won.
It's often said of aces that you have to get to them early. In one of the odder statistical quirks going, Darvish has exaggerated that cliché nearly beyond belief. Since he debuted in 2012, he owns the seventh-best ERA+ in baseball, better than that of David Price and Madison Bumgarner and Corey Kluber and Stephen Strasburg and Jon Lester. Only one starter in history -- Jose Fernandez -- struck out batters more frequently over a career. Darvish has made the All-Star team every season that he has been healthy. He's a bona fide ace.
But for about two minutes every night that he starts, Darvish gets lit up. No pitcher in baseball has been worse to start games, relative to the rest of his pitching, than Darvish. He allows an OPS almost 270 points higher to the first batter of the game than to everybody else. Here's how his pitching compares to the rest of his body of work:
The rest of the article is at
http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...ery-game-texas-rangers-yu-darvish-bad-pitcher
