Yu Darvish and Rangers Agree to 6 year/$60 Million Contract

The answer is that the Yankees will not have that many opportunities.

Japanese players in the MLB have a reputation for being babied and that includes Japanese pitching superstars having their schedules gimmicked to avoid tough competition. They can’t completely avoid tough lineups like the Yankees of course but they do their best to minimize their exposure.

The most famous recent example is of course Daisuke Matsuzaka. The word around the league got out that the Red Sox were massaging his pitching schedule, “skipped starts” and “injuries” to avoid pitching him against good offenses like the Yankees – even during his early years when he was supposedly their Ace starter with those inflated stats (and also a big reason FOR those inflated stats).

The stat wonks were passing around factoids last season that Matsuzaka was scheduled against the BOTTOM THIRD offenses TWICE as often as he saw the other 2/3.

And he’s in the AL EAST.

Can you say “Bottom Feeder”?

He almost never pitched against Yankees even though Boston and New York are in the same DIvision. Over the same time as Dice-K, Beckett faced the Yankees more than twice as often as the supposed Japanese superstar.

Even Tim Wakefield started more games against the Yankees during Dice-K’s 5 years in the AL East. Think about THAT!

Tim Wakefield. The guy is a decade older than Dice, gets paid chump change compared to the Japanese star, and was listed at the bottom of Boston’s pitching depth chart.

That’s how badly the Red Sox babied Matsuzaka – even to the point of throwing a respected and loyal veteran like Wakefield to the wolves… the Yankee lineup AND the Boston+New York media which would rip him up when the Yankees pounded Wakefield – when it SHOULD have been Dice-K taking the lumps.

Not surprisingly, this got alot of people’s hackles up in Boston’s organization. It was one of the things that caused everything to come apart at the seams and was the PRIMARY reason why the pitching staff stopped listening to Francona.

If you’ve been a Yankee fan over the past five years and you’ve wondered why your team rarely had a crack against the hyped-up Japanese superstar…well…you weren’t imagining things.

So don’t be surprised if the Yankees don’t see much of Yu Darvish in the coming years (unless the entire Yankee lineup gets replaced by the Mariners lineup). It’ll happen – just don’t be surprised if he pulls a “Dice-K” here and there (Yes, it’s been a verb among some MLB players for a while now).

or is saying “I hope NY f$%$ks Yu up so bad he has nightmares about it,” better? This is all due to my strong strong dislike of the Rangers because of what happened in the 2010 ALCS

after the NY series, so its part of the narrative that they broke him