YU DID IT.
At long last – or so it feels – Yu Darvish gave the Cubs a good SIX-INNING start. I think we all needed this, psychologically, and that includes Darvish, himself.
Of course, if you’d told me I’d be calling this start anything but a disaster after the first two innings, I wouldn’t have believed you. Once again, Darvish had no idea where his fastball was going, and it seemed like in the moments where he was especially needing to just throw a strike, he simply couldn’t. Those first two innings, despite the lack of Diamondbacks runs, were ugly. They were 56 unpredictable and wild pitches of ugly.
… but then, perhaps because he got five runs of support in the top of the third, a switch flipped, and Darvish just cruised for the next four innings. David Peralta got Darvish for a homer in the 6th, but other than that, it was just dominance of the kind we’ve always hoped to see from Darvish.
Offensively, the Cubs were absolutely raking the ball. David Bote had the big two-homer game, Anthony Rizzo also homered and doubled twice, Kyle Schwarber doubled twice, and it was hard contact after hard contact:
Good God: the #Cubs had 23(!) batted balls of at least 90 mph exit velocity last night, and 11(!) over 100 mph! pic.twitter.com/l3vVEHxKIi
— Bleacher Nation (@BleacherNation) April 28, 2019
That was fun.