Texas Rangers: Yu Darvish Back to DL Brings Big Implications

Texas Rangers pitcher Yu Darvish is back on the disabled list. His injury troubles may have more ramifications than the average player.

Monday night news broke that Texas Rangers star pitcher Yu Darvish was heading back to the disabled list. The official diagnosis is tightness and pain in the right shoulder and neck region. MRIs revealed a lack of discernible structural damage.

The Rangers are taking a simultaneously cautious, yet hopeful approach. GM Jon Daniels told reporters, “The way we are categorizing it, it’s not unusual for somebody coming back from surgery to have some soreness in another area. We are going to treat it cautiously and get him going again.”

While no team wants to see a major piece of their puzzle go down, Darvish’s injury may have come about at a relatively opportune point. The Rangers currently hold a five-game lead in the AL West over Seattle, who just lost their own ace, Felix Hernandez, this past week. King Felix will be sidelined 6-8 weeks. Darvish’s injury, however, is potentially more worrisome, for it may be indicative of an inauspicious pattern.

Darvish missed the end of 2014, and then all of 2015 after undergoing Tommy John surgery in March 2015. From 2012-2014 Darvish strung together a debut trio of seasons that was quietly one of the best in baseball history. The fastest pitcher ever to 500 strikeouts, Darvish recorded a collective 11.22 K/9 over those first three years, by far the best of any qualified starter during that time. His traditional stat line (39-25, 3.27/3.11/3.17 ERA-FIP-xFIP, over 545.1 IP) wasn’t too shabby either. He finished second in Cy Young voting in 2013. In his first three post-surgery starts he appeared to have retained much of his old formidability.

Fairly or unfairly, Darvish meant more to the Rangers, MLB and the game of baseball itself than an American-born pitcher producing the same numbers would have. Or Latin-born pitcher, for that matter. As a Japanese star he, his play and his celebrity, just like a number of others before him, represents a sporting ambassadorship.

The potential for his cultural impact to expand baseball’s international marketing enterprises, not to mention the growth of its prospective international talent pool, was central to his journey as a ballplayer. When he went under the knife it wasn’t just the Rangers’ ace arm that Dr. James Andrews sought to reconstruct, but a potential bridge between baseball as we know it and a more expansively diverse and widely engaged version of it many hoped to build for the future.

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These are the combination of factors that make the prospect of Darvish’s career tail-spinning into the depths of injury-induced irrelevance so saddening. We’d be losing an immense talent, as well as an opportunity to see the sport we love progress in ways that would be of the utmost benefit to its long-term sustainability. Of course, this may all turn out to be a premature pronunciation of doom. For all the reasons previously outlined, let’s hope that our gloomy worries are nothing more than unfounded hyperbole.

In the meantime, the elephant in the room will need to be addressed. It’s a thorny issue, because it may inadvertently touch upon topics that transcend baseball’s preferred incarnation as escapism entertainment. The question is why Japanese pitchers appear to be demonstrably more prone to injury than their American-born counterparts.

As is the case with most such difficult questions in life, the answers are ambiguous, if not elusive. However, those theories which do appear most premised in sound reasoning and actual evidence have nothing to do with any potentially ugly stereotype of one race or ethnicity possessing inherently inferior physiques or work ethic. Rather, the answers appear most rooted in that which we all ought to take heed to better understand and appreciate: cultural discrepancies.

Japan’s pitching culture is simply different than the one found stateside. From a young age Japanese pitchers are taught to more prominently utilize their lower halves.

This approach isn’t necessarily doomed to lead to arm troubles, but it does lead to a less balanced set of mechanics on the mound. When you rely more on your legs you’re more susceptible to bad things happening than someone who relies more on more parts of their body to generate the same velocity, movement, and consistency in release point and mechanical fluidity.

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However, Japanese pitching culture tends to self-correct for this potential pitfall. While much is made of how much their youth throw (Dice-K’s 250-pitch high school performance is still the stuff of internet legend), not nearly as much attention is paid to the very crucial fact that their professional leagues utilize six-man rotations, along with far less strenuous side sessions.

A number of confounding variables most likely culminate in the too-often repeated perfect injury storm when Japanese stars come to America. They are quickly made to adjust to an entirely new pitching schedule with the five-man rotation. They begin throwing a slightly larger baseball. They’ve already accumulated far more lifelong pitching mileage due to their high pre-professional workloads. Despite the six-man rotation they certainly rack up their fair share of work as pros: Take a look at the requirements for their version of the Cy Young Award.

And they tend to come over when they are already nearing an age when one’s legs begin to lose the natural strength, power, balance and flexibility that existed during their fast-twitch abundant 20s. Players who rely more heavily on their legs decline more sharply when they reach their late 20s and 30s. Just ask Carl Crawford how a lower half heavy plate approach has treated him on the other side of 30.

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So, let’s hope Yu Darvish really is just experiencing some minor soreness, and that it is the result of nothing more than the domino effect of moderately overcompensating in the aftermath of a major injury. Let’s collectively hold our breath and watch to see if Darvish becomes the next Dice-K. Maybe he’ll become the Japanese Mark Prior. Or maybe not.

Whatever ends up transpiring, we do know that as time moves on and the stakes become, in a number of ways, higher, teams will begin investing more time and research into the study of pitching mechanics, especially for those from overseas, so that the risks of their pricey investments may be mitigated, both on and off the field.

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