Casual baseball fans can be forgiven for not realizing that the Texas Rangers’ 2015 season — with its first game set for April 6 at Oakland — is already over.
On the heels of last year’s disastrous, injury-plagued campaign, the team found out in February that young second baseman Jurickson Profar — once such a hot prospect that the Rangers felt free to trade away Ian Kinsler — will miss the entire season following shoulder surgery. Then ace starting pitcher Yu Darvish felt tightness in his triceps after a spring training start, and a few days ago it was revealed that he has a partially torn ligament.
Darvish was sent to New York to get a second opinion from a specialist today, and the team is expected to announce its plans for him tomorrow. Either they’ll decide the injury can be healed via rest and rehab, or he’ll have surgery and miss the entirety of this year and likely a significant portion of 2016 as well.
Evan Grant says Darvish would be replaced in the rotation by a guy called “Chi Chi,” which makes the move a wash for the nation’s headline writers but a significant downgrade for the Rangers’ hopes of bouncing back in a big way.
Darvish is a fantastic hurler, among the best in the game. Even though the Tommy John procedure he’ll potentially undergo is so routine these days that it’s far from a death sentence, it still comes with huge question marks about whether he’ll return to play at anywhere near the level he has to this point. Michael Baumann of Grantland worries that we might never again a Darvish performance like his astonishing near-perfect game to start 2013:
I’d seen great pitching performances before, but this was something different. Curveballs in the dirt that were indistinguishable from the 96 mph fastball on the black until the hitter had already swung through it. The fading “what the fuck” slider and the biting “no, seriously, what the fuck” splitter, generating whiff after whiff after whiff — 26 swings-and-misses in total that night — in a display of sheer aggressive dominance that was almost incomprehensible to the mind as I watched it unfold. I’ll consider myself lucky if I ever see the likes of that game again. That, or the potential for that, is what we’ll be missing with Darvish on the shelf, and it’s why the fear that he’ll never be the same is so pointed.
It’s a sadly familiar fear, one we’ve experienced with Jose Fernandez and Matt Harvey in this golden age of velocity and hellacious breaking stuff and exploding UCLs. We experienced it with Halladay, and Brandon Webb, and so on all the way back to Smoky Joe Wood. We’ll experience it again soon, if not with Lucas Giolito, Carlos Rodon, or Brady Aiken, then with someone else. It’s unfortunately an inextricable part of the game, the cost of watching gifted men push the limits of what human physiology can support.
As baseball fans, we know it can always get worse. We accept that, occasionally, the gods demand a sacrifice. I just wish it didn’t have to be Darvish.
