http://projectprospect.com/article/2011/11/08/yu-darvish-scouting-report
Life is filled with difficult, vague, and unknowable questions. Yet
occasionally you get an easy one like 'who's the best pitching prospect in
Japan?' Answering anyone other than Yu Darvish is like saying another flavor
of Tic-Tac is better than orange. It's technically just an opinion, but any
other opinion is wrong.
It's possible someone like Hisashi Iwakuma outperforms Darvish stateside,
just like it's possible the reason Zooey Deschanel split with the dude from
Death Cab is she stumbled upon my writing and fell in love with me via my
word magic. There's a parallel universe where it'll happen, but it probably
won't be this one.
Yu Darvish is good, on that we can all agree. The question of just how good,
requires a little more insight and is, presumably, the reason you came here.
Darvish's last start came versus the Saiama Seibu Lions, a perennial
powerhouse in Nippon Professional Baseball. Through the magic of the
interwebs you can watch it here (http://www.justin.tv/asdfg585/b/298631204).
This start provided my first extended look at one of the planet's most hyped
prospects.
My previous exposure to Darvish, came via short stints in the World Baseball
Classic and YouTube videos, had left me kind of lukewarm on his prospect
status. But the more I see him, the more I bullish I become.
Basic Info
The half-Iranian Darvish towers over most of his Japanese rivals. His lanky
6-foot-5 frame could easily add 15 pounds of muscle without sacrificing any
of his excellent athleticism.
Darvish has been a truly dominant force in Japan for several season now. A
four-time All Star, Darvish is in the midst of a five year run posting
sub-2.00 ERA's (a NPB record) and thrice has had a WHIP of 0.90 or lower
while twice being named the league's MVP. Over his four full seasons as a
starter he has maintained a K:BB ratio of nearly 4.4:1 while whiffing over a
batter per inning.
There's no way to meaningfully splice the numbers in which Darvish doesn't
come out as one of the handful of greatest pitchers in Japanese history. If
he isn't the best of all time at his age (24), he's at least on the Mount
Rushmore.
Stuff
The righthander works with a deep array of pitches, common for top Japanese
hurlers. He throws four-seam, two-seam and cut fastballs and compliments them
with at least three different breaking balls. I've also seen reports of
Darvish mixing in a change-up and the ever elusive shuuto, often referred to
as a 'gyroball' in the US, where the batter sees a dot and thus reads
breaking ball but the pitch actually stays straight