According to widespread headline puns, the Blue Jays entered the winning bid for the rights to negotiate a contract with Yu Darvish.

If that’s true, it’s cool. I had been planning on rooting for Darvish, and the Jays are an eminently likable team, what with a) their new (old) uniforms, b) their smart-seeming front office, c) their uphill battle in the AL East, d) their drunk fans, and mostly e) their Jose Bautista.

I linked Eno Sarris’ analysis of Darvish’s NPB stats earlier this week, but I wanted to make a larger (and perhaps less coherent) point about them.

I wonder if there’s some form of diminishing returns in pitcher dominance due to the nature of pitching. You have to throw strikes to get guys out, and guys are sometimes going to swing at pitches in the zone, and every so often they’re going to make contact, and every so often a batted ball is going to fall in for a hit.

You won’t find many full seasons in modern-era Major League Baseball in which a pitcher posts an ERA better than the 1.50-1.80 range or a WHIP lower than about 0.85. There are a couple of exceptions (Bob Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in 1968 and Pedro Martinez’s 0.737 WHIP in 1999, basically), but I’d say those marks represent the absolute best a pitcher could ever hope to do given the amount of control he has over the results after the ball leaves his hand.

And it seems worth noting because Darvish has been right around those marks for five straight seasons now in Japan. So I wonder if it’s pointless to say, “Oh well his NPB stats are X% better than Daisuke Matsusaka’s and XX% better than Hideo Nomo’s so we can extrapolate that to mean he’ll be this much better than them stateside” because Darvish has been essentially pitching right up against the ceiling of dominance, and for all we know he’s like 30 times better than Matsusaka.

Does that make any sense? I guess it’d be important to know how often anyone has bettered or matched Darvish’s recent run of awesomeness in Japan, if ever.

Not that the above oversimplified extrapolation is what Eno did, at all, or anything like anything I’ve seen anyone do (though certainly someone has done it somewhere). I’m just saying there’s no reason to expect Darvish to disappoint just because at least one other big-name Japanese import fell short of expectations, if not for the obvious sample-size thing then because it might be impossible for Darvish to have consistently performed any better than he did over his last five seasons in Japan.

In other words, I’m holding on to the slim possibility he’ll exceed expectations. How cool would that be?