Anyone who only watched Yu Darvish pitch in the World Series would certainly not guess him to be the premier free agent signing of the offseason — probably second only to Shohei Ohtani so far — and the one who will likely set the market and potentially release the floodgates for the many remaining unsigned players.

But anyone who has watched Darvish otherwise — particularly in NLCS Game 3 against the Cubs, when he struck out seven in 6 1/3 innings while giving up only one run on a solo shot to Kyle Schwarber, or in the decisive third game of the division series against the Diamondbacks, when he went into the sixth inning with seven strikeouts and again only one run scored on a solo homer — knows better.

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Darvish’s otherwise sterling career should quiet worries over his World Series performance. And with just days left before pitchers and catchers report for spring training, he made a decision that shifts the landscape of the National League significantly, and one that puts Darvish in a place to earn some Fall Classic redemption with his new team, the Chicago Cubs.

The six-year, $126 million deal that comes with an extra $24 million in incentives grants Darvish a second year player opt-out, but in the first year of his new contract Darvish makes the Cubs again the top dogs in baseball’s senior circuit.

The fiercest competition will come from the Dodgers and Nationals, but neither team can quite match Chicago’s newly constructed rotation. Even before its latest addition, the Cubs’ staff was comfortably in the top half in baseball. Though a top three of Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill and Alex Wood in Los Angeles, and Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez in Washington presents formidable opposition, adding Darvish makes the Cubs the team best equipped to win in 2018 — especially in the playoffs.

Across the months of the regular season, perhaps having Darvish ups the Cubs’ win total by just a handful of games, but he will also help in a couple of ways that Chicago sorely needs: bullpen usage and walk rate.

Following the 2015 and 2016 seasons, in which the Cubs experienced remarkable good fortune with the health of their pitching staff, they had to send each of their starters to the DL at one point or another in 2017. This was not enough to keep them out of the postseason, but it did beleaguer the bullpen, and this especially showed in October.

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This is where Darvish comes in. In 2017, he went fewer than five innings in only four of his 31 starts. And Mike Montgomery, who likely would have taken the rotation spot now filled by Darvish, has not yet shown that he can match that kind of durability as a starter, even with Darvish’s injury history acknowledged.

Darvish also boasted a 27 percent strikeout rate and 7.6 percent walk rate last season, and the latter is especially appealing for a Cubs team that had the seventh-highest walk rate in the league in 2017. Even for all that he offers as an effective swingman, Montgomery simply cannot compete with that. His walk rate was a full three percentage points higher than Darvish’s last year.

Within their division, the Cubs will probably have a tougher fight against the Brewers and Cardinals than they did in 2017. Both teams improved significantly this offseason, but probably not enough to upend Chicago even before the addition of Darvish.

The Brewers, who rocked the National League just a couple of weeks ago by trading for Christian Yelich and signing Lorenzo Cain, are still in need of pitching. But none of the remaining free-agent starters can match Darvish’s value, and their rotation otherwise does not yet rival Chicago’s. They would have to dip into their farm system further to trade for a better starter if they don’t sign one, and that may not be a move general manager David Stearns wants to make in a rebuild that is barely out of its nascency.

The Cardinals, who just a few seasons ago were 100-game winners but have since failed to make the playoffs in consecutive years, will have the return of young phenom Alex Reyes to their staff, but they can no longer count on the once-steady Adam Wainwright to anchor their rotation. They’re otherwise dependent on a bevy of talented but young and mostly inexperienced starters.

From a postseason perspective, one of the most notable advantages to signing Darvish might come from who this leaves to pitch a Game 4 for the Cubs, Dodgers and Nationals. In Los Angeles, that’s probably Kenta Maeda, in Washington that’s probably Tanner Roark, and in Chicago that’s probably three-time World Series champion Jon Lester. The last man on that list has more career innings in the postseason than Maeda had during the 2017 regular season, and Roark has only made one postseason start in his career.

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Even if the rotation in Chicago is ordered differently and Lester gets the ball in an earlier game, this still leaves one of Kyle Hendricks, Jose Quintana or newcomer Darvish to take the hill in the fourth game of a postseason series.

Both the Dodgers and Nationals might be safe bets to win more regular season games this year than the Cubs, but neither is going to have an easy time besting Chicago in the postseason — unlike in 2017, when the Nationals took the Cubs through five brutal games, and the Dodgers dusted them off practically without effort.

Thanks to the addition of Darvish, this postseason could have a much different outcome.

Make no mistake: Both the Dodgers and Nationals will be juggernauts in their respective divisions and in the National League, but the power has shifted significantly out of their favor. Both teams have solid rotations, but the Cubs will go into the 2018 season with a top four who, according to Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projection model, have statistical near-age comparisons to Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Andy Pettitte and Tim Hudson. That’ll do.

If/when Darvish gets the ball this October, he’ll get his shot to silence critics who arose after his final two starts in the 2017 postseason. And with his decision this weekend, there’s a good chance he has put himself, and the Cubs, in position to take that shot all the way to the World Series.