What’s wrong with Yu Darvish? It’s an existential question that I wish I had an absolute answer to, but the reality is that baseball never has absolute answers. What I can tell you is that Darvish’s issues might stem from a variety of changes to his slider. He’s throwing that pitch to the opposite side of the plate and it looks very different overall.
Darvish’s slider location has changed
One reason Darvish was successful as a Ranger and Dodger was because he could pinpoint exactly where he wanted to throw the slider. For instance, Darvish owned batters in 2017 by locating on the outside portion of the plate to righties.