These are not very key times for Yu Darvish
/The purpose of One Strike Away is not to rail against the local D-FW media. However, these writers have a responsibility to inform their (mostly casual) reading audience of the truth, and when they fail it's the role of unprofessional bloggers (like myself) to clean it up.
You can thank me later.
Today Calvin Watkins -- that guy Brandon wrote about last night -- offered up another flummoxing post questioning Yu Darvish's commitment to the Texas Rangers.
This is mild inflammation and the Rangers don’t want to push Darvish into something that would hurt him in the long term. Darvish needs to show the club he can pitch through some discomfort, especially if games are meaningful.
The Rangers have the worst record in Major League Baseball, so.
But then he keeps writing, because what the hell? ESPNDallas has quotas.
But Darvish should let the club have more control over what's needed for him. He needs to have better communication with the front office and the manager to make things smoother. He just decided it was best to head to the DL, and it raised questions regarding his commitment to the club.
The last sentence is the most egregious, the idea that Darvish "just decided" to go to the disabled list, as if it was under his control. This is false.
Today the Dallas Morning News posted a transcript from a recent Jon Daniels radio interview, where Daniels explicitly says:
This is our call, I don’t want him pitching right now. I don’t want him to take a risk to get hurt.
Is Watkins being fed bad information? The possibility is there, obviously, but from the angles he's taken in recent articles it looks like he's just throwing whatever he can against the wall to see what sticks. If he was Randy Galloway or Mac Engel, this would be a forgivable offense, because everyone knows their job is to troll the fan base by any means necessary.
With Calvin Watkins, it just seems like he doesn't have a clue what baseball is about. It's not a matter of players being "tough," pitching through pain; there's so much more to consider. The Rangers have a huge stake in Yu Darvish's right arm, and it benefits neither the team nor the player to risk health when the team is 25-plus games out of first place.
These games aren't meaningful at all. They are the exact opposite of meaningful.
In related news, Evan Grants writes that Ron Washington has "backed off" his original timeline where he said Darvish would start August 25th in Seattle. I'm so not surprised by this good news.
Whether Yu Darvish has mild inflammation in his right arm or not, the Rangers are so far removed from meaningful baseball games that it's stupid. Questioning Darvish's commitment is not only unfair, it's just flat-out not the truth.