Darvish is Dealing

The MLB's too worried about blowing out their precious $15-million arms to risk having a pitcher stay in too long and get injured. I think that's where a lot of the paranoia about pitch counts stems from.

Japanese pitchers seem to throw more, sure, but they also build up more endurance so they can throw more. (Plus, in theory, they don't throw quite as hard on every pitch as their MLB counterparts do.) 120 pitches doesn't seem that abnormal for a Japanese game to me. When Rakuten's Kanehisa Arime was left in for the entirety of a 188-pitch 12-inning tie game last year, that was out of line, and messed him up for quite a while, I think.

I would actually guess that in several of the games this year where Darvish threw the whole game, he did so because he wanted to get the win. The Fighters' bullpen has been ... well ... well, getting better, at least.

As for your last question: Why not ask again in five or six years? It seems pretty pointless for anyone to speculate on things like that right now, and as a Fighters fan, I personally have no desire to see him leave the team.

Having seen Yu Darvish pitch, he has just been spectacular this year, and his stuff is just going to get better. His control is better, he's showing a bit more maturity, and no, I don't think Hillman is overworking him. People said the exact same thing about Jack McKeon overworking Josh Beckett, Dontrelle Willis, and AJ Burnett while with the Marlins, and, with the exception of that crybaby Burnett, they've been fine.

Now that I've seen baseball on both sides of the Pacific, I'm wondering why we in America don't let our starters go longer? I can understand taking them out if they get in trouble late in the game (example: Curt Schilling only threw 99 pitches yesterday, but got into trouble in the 7th and was taken out, deferring to Okajima), but if their pitch count isn't that high, and they feel like they can go all the way, then why not let them?