NEWSLETTER
What is MLB planning to do? Make a new offer on prorated pay? Send another pissy letter? Cancel the season? Good luck guessing at this point. I’d rather not.
Meanwhile, Yu Darvish is still out there throwing bullpen sessions with a fastball in the mid-90s. The guy is such a beast.
But more than that, he’s a tireless worker. Darvish isn’t just throwing bullpens, he’s ALWAYS working on his pitches – the point where he’s currently crafting a new one: a hybrid of his splitter and his two-seam fastball, which he is calling the Supreme (well, that’s there the translation goes anyway):
今日はブルペン。シーズンあるかわからんけど。
— ダルビッシュ有(Yu Darvish) (@faridyu) June 16, 2020
投げてきました。
4シームが94-96、スプリーム（仮）は92-94だったので試合中だと場面次第で96ぐらい出るかも。
ツーシームより安全な気がするのでこっちをツーシームのかわりに使うのもありかなと思ってます。 https://t.co/oD3yGwOe6l— ダルビッシュ有(Yu Darvish) (@faridyu) June 16, 2020
The Google translations, which are imperfect, but seem to be pretty close based on the context from some of his other tweets:
Today’s bullpen. I don’t know if there is a season.
The ball between the two seams and the split, but I want everyone to name it. Is it Supreme? I thought, but it looks like Supreme. I think it would be interesting to have professionalism in it.
I threw it. 4 seams were 94-96, and Supreme (provisional) was 92-94, so maybe 96 at the scene during the match. I feel safer than two-seam, so I think it would be a good idea to use this instead of two-seam.
If you can remember back when baseball was a thing, you might recall that, among Darvish’s literal 10 useable pitches, his splitter was among his most dominant pitches in the second half of last season. You may further recall that it is an uncommonly hard splitter (90+ mph velo), and moves much more like a two-seamer than your typical split-change would.
So, then, it actually makes a lot of sense that Darvish would be playing around in this range of pitches, since there is some classification overlap, and it makes more sense to go with a Supreme if you feel like that plays better off your (already-excellent) splitter than your actual two-seamer, which Darvish has not always controlled as well as he’d like. Based on that velo, it looks like we would still think of his Supreme as something more like a two-seam fastball, but hey, if he wants to call it the Supreme, I am not going to pass on the chance!
(Although we may later learn that the translation is trying to turn some hybrid word into English, and actually a better translation is something like split-seam or spleamer, which would also be fine.)
