A Tale of Two Aces: San Diego Bests New York 7-1

You bring in star pitchers for games like this. Cost? That’s for the accountants. You can’t put a price on a lockdown playoff start, the kind that sucks the air out of the opposing offense one out at a time. Bring in an ace, find your way to the playoffs, and the dominance will flow.

Oh, this is awkward. Did you think I was talking about Max Scherzer? I meant Yu Darvish, who the Padres acquired before the 2021 season in a blockbuster trade. Darvish didn’t harness his usual swing-and-miss stuff Friday night, but he’s spent the entire 2022 season learning how to succeed without it. He’s never run a lower strikeout rate or missed fewer bats, but it hasn’t mattered: He’s having his best season in eight years thanks to a raft of soft contact and no walks to speak of.

Darvish has been a cutter-first pitcher for years, and he leaned into it to the tune of 39 cutters in 101 pitches against the Mets. It’s still Yu Darvish we’re talking about, so he threw six different pitch types, but cutters and four-seamers comprised 65% of his offerings. Add in his slider, and the count climbs to 90%. We think of Darvish as overpowering opposing hitters, but he’s become adept at keeping them off balance, with equally offense-suppressing results. The Mets were eternally in a 1-2 count, eternally popping up pitches they were just too early or too late on.

That kind of performance can put you to sleep; a soft grounder to first here and a fly out to left there, and before you know it, it’s the seventh inning. We love strikeouts and whiffs here at FanGraphs because over the long run, they do a great job of predicting future pitcher success. But let’s be clear. Darvish baffled the Mets, and they got exactly what they deserved on their swings: a whole lot of nothing. Of Darvish’s 21 outs, 10 were fly balls of 40 degrees or higher, and another four were pounded straight into the ground. Throw in four strikeouts, and he just didn’t make the defense behind him work very hard.

Want to encapsulate Darvish’s evening in one confrontation? In the bottom of the seventh, he started Mark Canha off with four straight cutters, falling behind 3-1 in the process. Then he went to work. After a high slider that Canha took for strike two, Darvish poured breaking ball after breaking ball into the strike zone. Canha battled gamely, fouling off six straight pitches (four sliders, two cutters), but he couldn’t put anything in play. Finally, Darvish sped him up with a fastball, and all Canha could do was weakly pop out to short. That’s the kind of night it was; Eduardo Escobar muscled a middle-middle fastball for a home run, but for the most part, Darvish didn’t give anyone the opportunity to beat him.

Max Scherzer doesn’t succeed the same way that latter-day Darvish does. He cows opposing hitters, flooding the zone with bullying fastballs and mean-spirited secondary pitches. His slider isn’t hunting weak contact; it’s hunting an ugly swing and an awkward trudge back to the dugout. It worked this season; Scherzer’s 2.29 ERA was the lowest mark of his illustrious career. But it didn’t work on Friday.

In the first inning, Josh Bell smashed an opposite-field two run shot to open the scoring; Trent Grisham followed with a solo blast of his own in the second. That’s all Darvish would need, but the Padres weren’t done. After two runners reached in the fifth, Jurickson Profar snuck a soft liner just fair down the right field line for a three-run homer. Manny Machado closed out the San Diego outburst by obliterating a fastball to left field for a 7-0 lead, chasing Scherzer from the game.

It’s not so much that Scherzer served up a plate of meatballs: Bell and Grisham both tagged hittable fastballs, but Profar and Machado hit well-located pitches. The bigger problem was that Scherzer wasn’t missing any bats. He simply gave the Padres too many bites at the apple; they didn’t crush every pitch they made contact with, but swing at enough without succumbing to a strikeout, and something good will happen.

Scherzer garnered only eight whiffs on the night. That’s his second-lowest mark of 2022, ahead of only his first start of the year. His pitches looked, for lack of a better word, flat: his slider and cutter lacked their usual bite, and his fastball wasn’t any better. The Padres swung at 16 fastballs and came up empty on just two. Scherzer’s normal plan when his fastball isn’t clicking is to switch to his slider and changeup; when that failed, he was at the mercy of the batted ball gods, and they showed no mercy on a balmy night in Queens.

It’s funny how baseball works sometimes. Scherzer threw 21 fewer pitches than Darvish, but garnered one more swing-and-miss. He matched Darvish in strikeouts despite recording seven fewer outs, and didn’t walk anyone. Watch the game, though, and there was no mistaking who was dealing and who was out of sorts.

Scherzer was aiming to miss bats. Darvish was aiming to coax poor swings. Scherzer didn’t get what he wanted; Darvish did. In the long run, maybe those will even out. Maybe Darvish will miss his spots sometime and fall under the weight of all the baserunners his new pitch-to-contact style invites. Maybe Scherzer’s pitches will break an extra half an inch and lead to a parade of opposing strikeouts. Play out enough games over a long enough window, and missing bats is the best thing a pitcher can do.

It’s like John Maynard Keynes said, though: in the long run, we’re all dead. This game doesn’t have to be a referendum on how pitching works; it’s a referendum on whether Yu Darvish could hold the Mets down longer than Max Scherzer could stymie the Padres. Darvish was on top of his craft. Scherzer wasn’t. The Mets will have to hope that they can solve Blake Snell and quiet San Diego’s bats in Game 2, or it’ll be a long dark winter in New York.