Yu Darvish

Yesterday Darvish started his first spring training game. According to scouts his fast ball reached up to 95 MPH and was consistently 93 MPH. His slider was also very effective. He struck out two batters and got ahead of batters in the count. 26 of his 36 pitches were strikes. Will Venable hit a 410 foot double off of Darvish, but that was the only well struck ball. The other hit was by Orlando Hudson.

In Japan Darvish's ERA was never over 2.00 and he has about 200 innings pitched each of his 5 seasons. He also strikes out slightly more than one batter every inning. Darvish is probably the most hyped up Japanese pitcher ever, but lets see how he may do.

Daisuke Matsuzaka was another hyped up pitcher coming over from Japan. He had an average ERA of 3.00 over his 7 seasons in Japan. That is not even close to Darvish's sub 2.00 ERA. When Matsuzaka pitched for The Boston Red Sox in his first season he pitched 204 innings with a 4.40 ERA. He was a fluke, but in his second season he pitched 167 innings with a 2.90 ERA. Then from 2009-2011 he had an ERA above 5.00.

Hiroki Kuroda had a 3.69 ERA in his time in Japan with 103 wins. In the MLB he has a 3.45 ERA with 41 wins. Kuroda came to the U.S. when he was 33, Darvish is 25. Hideo Nomo came to play in the MLB at the age of 26. He had a 3.15 ERA in Japan and posted a 2.54 ERA in his first season with The Dodgers. He would only have 3 other seasons of with an ERA below 4 and about 3 years into his contract Nomo had a 5.05 ERA.

Yu Darvish is major league ready. He is consistently pitching a lot of innings and his ERA is incomparable to other pitchers who made the transition. Never posting a an ERA higher than 1.88 ERA is great and Darvish may have a promising career in The MLB.