A preview of Yu and his big debut

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited about tomorrow. In what will be one of the biggest stories of the baseball year, Yu Darvish will make his Major League debut when he pitches against the Seattle Mariners.

There’s a lot of speculation and predictions as to how successful Darvish will be in 2012, and the answers seem to very quite a bit. Some experts have predicted a Cy Young worthy performance, whereas others speculate whether he can be anything above a middle of the rotation starter.

If you look at Darvish’s career numbers in Japan, they show how dominant he was in. Over the course of seven seasons, Darvish went 93-38 with a 1.99 ERA. The argument could (and should) be made that the quality of baseball in Japan doesn’t compare to that of the Major Leagues, so all stats should be taken in perspective.

Obviously the Texas Rangers thought highly enough of Darvish to not only post over 50 million dollars to negotiate with Darvish, but also signed him to a six-year 60 million dollar contract. There’s not too many pitchers who are worth nearly 20 million dollars a year, so there’s certainly a great amount of risk in signing Darvish.

I’ll admit to being a bit of a skeptic. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’ll post decent enough numbers in his rookie season, but it’s hard for me to reasonably expect him to post an ERA below 3.50 and win more than 17 games. I’m not saying it can’t or won’t be done, you just wouldn’t see me bet on either of those. What I do know is I’ll be watching tomorrow night with a great deal of curiosity.

So when Yu makes his debut, how do you think you think he’ll do?