For Darvish, chance for a ring with Dodgers ended with him
Published 11:39 pm Saturday, November 4, 2017
LOS ANGELES — In the end, the first World Series of Yu Darvish’s career could not have gone any worse. He pitched abysmally in Game 3 and no better in Game 7.
So as the Houston Astros celebrated the first championship in franchise history on Wednesday night, Darvish was left to contemplate what went wrong for him and his Los Angeles Dodgers teammates. And especially for him.
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“This pain is going to stay in me for a while,” Darvish, who is from Japan, said afterward as he spoke through an interpreter.
His World Series numbers speak to that anguish. His win-loss record was 0-2. His ERA was an absurd 21.60. And the five runs he quickly allowed in Game 7, four of which were earned, took all the momentum away from the Dodgers after they had won Game 6.
Darvish, 31, knew all of this and opted to speak to reporters after Game 7 in the main interview room, even though he was not required to by league rules. Normally in the postseason, the losing pitchers speak at their lockers, and the only member of the losing team to go to the podium is the manager.
Darvish’s decision was based in part on the number of reporters looking to get answers from him, and on his desire not to create a traffic jam in the somber Dodgers clubhouse. But there also seemed to be a measure of accountability in his choice, as if he felt it was incumbent on him to sit in the spotlight and answer all of the questions about why he had pitched so poorly.
“I had bad days,” he said, “and that means somebody else had a great day. I try to think of it that way, and sometimes it works. Maybe this time it didn’t work because I let my teammates down.”
Darvish, who came to the major leagues in 2012 amid a good deal of fanfare and joined the Dodgers in July in a trade designed to fortify their chances to win a championship, is hardly the first player to stumble so profoundly in the Series. There have been many of them over the decades and, as it turns out, Darvish’s awful performance is a perfect match for the one turned in by Art Ditmar of the New York Yankees in the 1960 World Series against Pittsburgh. Ditmar started Games 1 and 5 for the Yankees and lost both of them, matching Darvish’s 0-2 record. He also ended with the same, ugly 21.60 ERA now on Darvish’s résumé. And like the Dodgers in 2017, the Yankees lost that Series in seven games.
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In the aftermath of Game 7 on Wednesday night, Darvish’s teammates did their best to keep him from feeling that he was the biggest reason they had lost the Series.
“It’s never about one guy,” third baseman Justin Turner nobly insisted. “It’s about 25 guys, and we lost as a team.”
And Turner had a point. If Kenley Jansen had not blown a save in Game 2, if Clayton Kershaw had not blown two leads in Game 5, the Series might have turned out differently. And yet Darvish’s failures were particularly glaring because they put the Dodgers in big holes so early in two games, holes that the Dodgers could not get out of.
On Wednesday night, with the fans in Dodger Stadium looking on, perhaps a little nervously, Darvish was unable to rebound from his struggles in Game 3. The leadoff hitter, the Astros’ George Springer, doubled, and by the time the top of the first inning was over it was already 2-0, Houston.
The top of the second was no better. With a runner on base and the score 3-0, Darvish shook off a sign from his catcher, Austin Barnes, who had called for a slider, and instead threw a fastball to Springer, who drilled it into the left-field pavilion for a home run. The Astros had a 5-0 lead that was both demoralizing and insurmountable.
“The home run by Springer, that was a tough blow,” said Kershaw, the Dodgers’ ace, who pitched four scoreless innings in relief after Darvish departed, to no avail.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts dismissed questions afterward about whether Darvish should have even started Game 7, considering how poorly he had done in Game 3. Some wondered if Alex Wood might have been a better choice, or even Kershaw, who would have been starting the game on just two days’ rest. But Roberts did not think either of those options was realistic.
And even after the Dodgers had fallen behind, 3-0, in the second inning, Roberts said, he thought Darvish’s pitches were good enough to allow him to face Springer for the second time in the game. It was a decision that might haunt Roberts for some time, but at least he had the right analysis of the outcome.
“I think anything other than a homer,” he said dryly, “would have been considerably better.”
Darvish is now a free agent, and while he said Wednesday he would like to return to the Dodgers, free agency can go in unpredictable directions. What is certain is that Darvish remains undeterred by what happened to him in the past week.
“I would like to come back in the World Series,” he said. “And I want to pitch better.”