ANAHEIM, Calif. – Yu Darvish on Wednesday night made his fifth start of the season, the 34th of his career on this side of the ocean, and after three innings a veteran scout tapped into his phone, "Darvish might have the best slider I've ever seen tonight."

Not Darvish's best slider. Anybody's best slider. Of the tens of thousands of sliders this scout had witnessed, recorded and committed to memory, the best slider. That one.

And Darvish has, like, a half-dozen other pitches.

Several hours earlier, a more veteran scout (by perhaps 20 years) listened attentively to the clumsily phrased question: "How many pitchers have you seen with both the quantity of pitches and the quality of pitches possessed by Darvish?"

He got the gist, formed an O with his thumb and forefingers, and grinned.

"Zero," he said.

In the fourth inning at Angel Stadium, Darvish's former teammate, Josh Hamilton, came to the plate with two outs. The first pitch was a 60-mph curveball. Hamilton swung over it. Darvish got the ball back and stared in.

Darvish's catcher then went to the mound.

"I put down all 10 signs and he didn't want any of them," A.J. Pierzynski later explained.

The second pitch to Hamilton was a 98-mph fastball, which Hamilton took for a ball. In between the two, you could have fit the speed limit in most residential neighborhoods.

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By the merciful end of a thorough AL West thrashing here, Darvish had gone six innings (extending his scoreless streak to 18 innings), allowed three hits and two walks and struck out 11. By eyeball count, Darvish threw 47 sliders in his 100 pitches. Twenty-seven of the sliders were swung at and missed (plenty by a foot or so), or taken for strikes, or fouled off. Six were put into play, only one of them with some authority.





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That's the thing about barely hittable pitches, too, and the reason Darvish could be so dominant and yet be excused with still three innings to go. (That and the 11-run lead with which he departed.) That is, so few are put into play, Darvish has to throw lots of them. Through five starts, he's struck out a major-league best 49. Only once in five starts has he lasted more than seven innings – he retired the first 26 batters of his first start, only to lose the perfect game and the no-hitter – and still he's struck out at least 10 three times. And that leads us to perhaps a reasonable inside-the-numbers comparison to Darvish.

Derek Lowe, who's in his 17th season and coming up on 40 years old, swears he's seen something like Yu before. The variety of pitches, the velocity, the savvy, the heartlessness of it all and the resulting workload, it reminds Lowe of Pedro Martinez.

"People talk about all the high pitch counts," Lowe said, "and I go to Pedro. His stuff is so good they can't hit him. Pedro used to say, 'I throw every pitch expecting them to hit it. When I throw it over the plate, they're probably going to hit it. Then they don't.'"

So, he'd throw another. And another. Kind of like Darvish. Martinez won 219 games, won three Cy Young Awards and is going to the Hall of Fame. Darvish just got here, has won 20 games (and lost 10), and isn't yet in Martinez's universe. But, similarities exist, according to Lowe.