SNY: Berg: Will the Mets look Far East for talent?

Berg interviews Patrick Newman of NPB Tracker.

Berg: Finally, Yu Darvish. How good is he, how good can he be and can we expect to see him pitching in the Majors in the next couple of years?

Newman: Darvish is the best pitcher in Japan right now. He’s put up two consecutive sub-2.00 ERA, sub-0.90 WHIP seasons at age 21-22. To compare, Matsuzaka’s best ERA in Japan was 2.13, at age 25. Can he get better? Probably. He’s 22 (three months younger than Junichi Tazawa), has solid command of a couple breaking pitches, and has added a couple of miles per hour to his fastball over the last couple of years. He certainly has the stuff and composure to continue to improve.

Darvish has said repeatedly that he’s not interested in coming to MLB—his most recent comment was that he wanted to win 200 games in Japan. He’s 48-19 in his career so far. Note that this is to some extent unusual—Uehara, Hideki Matsui and others had talked openly about wanting to play in MLB before making the leap. My guess is that he’ll eventually want to give MLB a shot, but it’s a ways off. He’s a minimum of five years away from free agency, and I don’t really see him getting posted. So we’ll see what happens. The interesting thing is that this is the first time we’re seeing an NPB star attract a significant following outside of Japan this early in his career. I hope this can be leveraged to attract new fans to the league.