Wednesday a.m. Rangers things

This is what Darvish basically said in his farewell speech to the Nippon Ham fans. I translated this myself, so parts of it (or most of it) might not be smooth or accurate:

“I’ve said in the past that I do not wish to play in America, and originally even thought that I would rather quit playing baseball than play in the Majors. But the circumstances have changes since then. As a ball player, I take joy in competing with and beating my opponents. But nowadays people tell me to ‘go easy’ on the batters. I crave for fierce competition. I want the batters that I face to really come at me and try to knock me down. That’s the kind of competition that I desire. But lately it has been hard for me to keep myself motivated. I feel at home here in the Japanese league but in order to quench my thirst for competition, I felt the need to go play in the Majors. I’ve thought long and hard about this, but in the end I decided that I needed a change of scenery.”

“I entrusted the entire negotiation process to my agent. He told me that the negotiations would go down to the wire. I never really cared much about the size of the contract that I would get. I haven’t watched a whole lot of MLB games and thus am not familiar with the league, but the Texas FO and the players gave me a warm welcome and made me feel at home, kind of like how I feel here at Nippon Ham. My goal is to become a pitcher that the people would immediately think of when asked who the best pitcher in the world is.”

I’ve heard that Yu as a youth tried very hard to fit into the Japanese society. Far Eastern countries like Japan or Korea are monoracial and their societies sometimes tend to be exclusive to people of foreign or biracial origins like Yu. This is why Yu developed a strong desire to prove himself so that he can accepted into the society. Thus, he preferred to play in the Japanese league where he can pitch in front of the Japanese people. This was to explain why Yu said he did not want to play in the Majors. It’s not because he had something against MLB or America.

But recently, he seemed to be losing his focus on the game. He would experiment things during the middle of regular season games. He would suddenly change his repertoire of pitches (probably the main reason why he is reported to have so many types pitches), change his pitching mechanics, and in some games he purposely would not throw a single four seamer. The funny thing is, despite all this his stats continued to be off the charts. He was that much better than his competion. It’s no surprise he could not keep himself motivated in Japan. And this is why he changed his mind and decided to play in the Majors.

This is very much like how Ichiro was in the later years of his Japanese career. Ichiro was so far above his peers in terms of baseball prowess that he did not even have to try hard to be the very best in Japan, so he had trouble keeping himself motivated. Thus he chose to play in the Majors, where he has established himself as HoF caliber player. I wish Yu would follow in Ichiro’s footsteps and become a great player in the the big leagues.