Chicago Cubs: What the team needs from Yu Darvish in Milwaukee

After a lackluster debut last week, Yu Darvish takes on the division rival Milwaukee Brewers, hoping to propel the Chicago Cubs to victory.

To call Yu Darvish’s regular season Chicago Cubs debut disappointing just about hits it on the head. The club’s $126 million offseason acquisition lasted just 4 1/3 innings, allowing five runs on five hits and a pair of walks.

For those of you doing the math at home, that equates to a 10.38 ERA and ghastly 6.79 FIP. But, as we’ve heard (and said) so many times in the past week, the season is young. What we’ve seen is likely far too small a sample size to mean anything other than the Cubs are off to a slow start in 2018.

Darvish battled cramp-like symptoms throughout his start in Miami, but his battery mate made sure to not make excuses after the game.

"“He just made a lot of mistakes,” Willson Contreras said. “He’s going to have a great year. The first one wasn’t as good as he is. But the other thing is he’s facing a new team, a completely new team. We don’t know what they’re trying to do. They’re just swinging and swinging. They just take and take. To me, he has to make better pitches than he did today.”"

Willson hits it on the head with that last statement. We’re going to get deeper into what Darvish needs to do in order to be successful against the Brewers. But it really comes down to execution.