Rangers’ Yu Darvish perfect-game bid falls an out short

The Darvish of August and September is the pitcher the Rangers need to have around for a solid six months. That’s not because of how much the Rangers are paying him or some unrealistic notion that he has to live up to his career 1.72 ERA in Japan, where the level of play was once estimated to be roughly akin to our own Double-A baseball, but simply because this is a team that has been in desperate need of a number one starter, an ace.

That leaves Harrison, who was very good in 2011 and very, very good in 2012. He’s also a pitch-to-contact guy, and as we saw in the season’s first game, pitch-to-contact guys are not the safest bets for year-in, year-out consistency, simply because bad things can happen on balls in play. Harrison should be good again this year, but number-one pitcher good? That’s far from a certainty.

Watching a replay of the hit that broke up the perfect-game bid of Japanese-born Rangers starter Yu Darvish, a member of the Astros announcing team on CSN -- consisting of Bill Brown, Alan Ashby and Geoff Blum -- commented, “That’ll force the guy to learn some of the language here in America,” as you can see in the above video.

A bit of chuckling occurred after that, then the response, “Some of the more inappropriate language. I like it.”