Yu Darvish's job for the Texas Rangers as their ace and one of the top three pitchers in the American League is to do ace things — start win streaks and stop losing skids.
The hope Thursday night was that Darvish would turn in one of his masterful performances in Baltimore to end a Rangers losing skid that had reached four games and to avoid a four-game sweep at the hands of the Orioles.
Turns out, the Rangers will have to wait until Friday night to get that special treatment from Darvish after he was pushed back to the series opener against the Mets due to the threat of rain in Baltimore on Thursday. There was a 90 percent chance of storms, and they came, forcing the start to be delayed an hour, but once the game began it was never stopped.
The thought was a good one. You'd hate to get two or three good innings out of Darvish then for a storm to move through and delay the game for an hour and a half, forcing Darvish to sit the rest of the game because he's cold.
You want to get all you can out of every Darvish start, especially the way things are currently going for the Rangers, so it's hard to argue against the Rangers' thought process. It just turns out it was all for nothing, and the Rangers lost another game.
Hopefully for their sake, Darvish can do his job tonight and prevent the latest losing streak from going to six games.
