Yu Darvish Is Singlehandedly Saving The Cubs From #LigmaBallSackGate

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The Cubs are 5-1 since firing LigmaBallSack and there’s no one to blame it on more than Yu Darvish. In 2 starts in the 2nd half he’s 2-0 with 15 strikeouts in 12 innings against 4 hits and 1 walk. That’s good for a 3:1 strikout-to-WHIP ratio if such a thing ever existed but it doesn’t. Which should be even more impressive. Yu Darvish is making us invent baseball statistics.

You can slice and dice it however you want but if you’ve been paying attention to Red Line Radio at all then this is Non News.

The Cubs have been hand holding Darvish since spring training to get to this point. Here’s a look at his inning count from April through May.

After each start I was progressively rationalizing myself to him getting built up. Not physically, but emotionally. He’s a guy who needs to feel apart of the team and city. He needs a culture fit and proverbial Big Hug every time he takes the mound. And unfortunately that isn’t in the MLB cards more often than not which brings me back to managing his emotions.

For that reason, I’m only talking innings pitched April through May. I wanted to see him grind into consistent 6+ inning performances. Not really caring as much about Hits or how shitty he looks, but almost entirely about him participating in the game and not having any kind of breakdown. The logic there is sooner or later he’s going to get re-settled. You just can’t get there if you’re not on the mound. So taking the ball every 5th day and not laying a 3-inning eggs was huge.

The progression in June was equally important. Here’s his 5 starts and this time we’re looking slightly past IP and include some of the basics:

He pitched at least into the 6th inning in the first 4 starts with an overall health K:BB ratio 32:8::4:1, which is way above his career average and that’s when it starts to click. Yu’s correcting mistakes, finding his rhythm and getting consistently deep into games relative to April and May. All of this shit is pointing in the right direction because he’s limiting his number of mistakes and getting more command of his fastball/slider combo.

Then mix in the summer heat. Yu’s a big guy with a lot of moving pieces in his delivery. Those guys are always always ALWAYS better when you can get a hot lather and loosen that big body up. So that’s another trend that had us feeling good about Yu into the summer. And again, if you listen to Red Line Radio, nothing I’m saying is new because we’ve been talking about this with him since Day 1…. just build him up so when it’s time to run, he’ll be one of the best pitchers in the world for a solid 4-6 week stretch.

With that said here’s his July game log:

Strike Percentage = 69.96% which is absurdly high for a guy who had a 19.3% walk rate through 2 months, worst in baseball by an alarming amount. And from there you know he’s going at hitters with his stuff. Not fucking around, not playing games, etc. He’s just pounding the zone with 96-98 and making them put his slider in play. In turn, you’re looking at 1 walk… 1 goddamn walk in 18.2 innings? He had 49 walks in the previous 80 innings. So talk about a little twist of aggression on the mound:

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Which brings me back to the biggest takeaway about Yu and Power Pitchers in general:

He doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Simple wins. Before, we saw him labor through 6 different pitches and trying to paint every corner of the strike zone. He couldn’t get a flow with Contreras and had no conviction behind his fastball, which meant a boat load of cut fastballs and sinkers and all this cute shit.

The man fist pumping in that gif is a different dude. That’s a guy who knows his stuff is going to be better than almost any hitter 99/100 times he can channel it. So that gives him the confidence to uncork it and the fact he’s built himself up to this point gives me confidence this version of Yu Darvish is here to stay.

And if he’s not, at least we got that fist pump. All Gas No Brakes never went so hard.