Yu Darvish’s Pitching Repertoire
Looking at the MLB standings it seems that Yu Darvish remains the Cub’s hope of making it deep into the playoffs. He is on course to be a Cy Young winner this year. Let’s look at his pitching repertoire.
Yu Darvish has thrown well over 19,000 pitches all of which have been tracked and analyzed by the PITCHf/x system from 2009 to 2020. He has an amazing repertoire which he uses based on the situation.
Darvish has up to 7 pitches all of which have different average velocities. A few even have their own variations.
- The Cutter
This one has an average velocity of 89.94mph. It is estimated that Darvish throws a cutter up to 35.9% of the time. It is the most used pitch in his repertoire.
Darvish has two varieties of this pitch with a second faster cutter at 90 mph. Most of the time, Darvish will use the cutter with a left-handed hitter.
- The Four-Seam Fastball
Darvish will use this on the first pitch in 34.6% of the time. It has a velocity of 94.0mph and a 2520rm spin rate. He has used this pitch in 28% of the time. However, it is responsible for up to 39% of his home runs.
- The Two-Seam Fastball
This is a fast pitch at 93.5mph. Despite being one of his most successful pitches, Darvish didn’t use it in the first three starts of the season.
His final pitch, however, was spectacular managing to use it to hit the batter the catcher and the umpire.
- The Slider
This pitch is much slower than Darvish’s cutter at 82.5mph and has a more horizontal streak. This pitch has a called strike in up to 38.6 % of the time that he uses it.
- The Curveball
Darvish has three different versions of the curveball. Counting the regular curve, the other two include the knuckle curve and the slow curve.
The regular curveball has a velocity of 76mph, the knuckle-curve has an 81.3mph velocity, and the slow curve at 63.7mph.
Looking at the three versions, it is clear to spot that the knuckle curve is up to 13 miles faster compared to the slow curve and up to 5 miles faster than the regular curve.
That said, Darvish doesn’t resort to the regular curveball very often and normally uses it between 2 and 9 percent of times during a season. While it looks good during the throw it is not considered Darvish’s primary weapons.
That title is often given to the knuckle-curve as he will throw it when least expected and seem to come out of nowhere.
- The Split Finger Fastball
Often you don’t expect a pitcher to have both a splitter and a changeup of it. However, Darvish does. The split-finger fastball has a velocity of 88.6mph.
Darvish had stopped using this pitch after he underwent a Tommy John surgery in 2015. Darvish had attempted to bring it back but only threw it a few times in 2017. This year however he has upped the number of throws using the split-finger fastball with up to 44 throws by August this year.
- The Changeup
The Changeup has a velocity of 84.1mph. Darvish doesn’t use this one a lot but he still uses it on occasion. It is a special type of pitch as it seems like a changeup of a pitch that is already a changeup.
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