Yu Darvish has haunted the Chicago Cubs ever since being traded away before the 2021 season, and on Thursday, he returns to Wrigley Field with the season on the line.
The 39-year-old former Cubs pitcher takes the mound for the Padres in Game 3 of the NL Wild Card Series, standing squarely between Chicago and a date with the MLB-best Brewers in the National League Division Series.
Every pitch carries weight, every inning matters — and Cubs fans know all too well the kind of trouble Darvish can bring when the stakes are high.
The winner moves on; the loser packs their bags and watches the rest of the postseason from the couch. After picking up their first playoff victory since 2017 on Tuesday, the Cubs hope to finish the job in front of a home crowd — but first, they must survive their matchup with an old friend.
Darvish, sidelined for the first half of the 2025 season with elbow inflammation and general fatigue, returned on July 7 and made 15 starts down the stretch for San Diego. While his season stats — a 5-5 record and 5.38 ERA — might suggest Chicago has the starting pitching advantage with Jameson Taillon (11–7, 3.68 ERA), Darvish’s reputation as a “big game pitcher” tells a different story. He’s been in the spotlight plenty of times before, and the playoffs seem to suit him more than most.
Across his last seven career playoff starts, he has a 2.58 ERA and 0.93 WHIP. He has also been particularly sharp against the Cubs.
Since leaving Chicago, Darvish has been the Cubs’ kryptonite. In five starts against his former team as a Padre, he is 3-1 with a 2.10 ERA, 0.80 WHIP, and 9.9 strikeouts per nine innings. The Padres have won four of those five games.
If the Cubs want to keep dancing in October, they’ll need to attack and get to Darvish early. The Padres proved on Wednesday what they can do with a lead, and Chicago doesn’t want to see Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, and Robert Suarez coming out of the bullpen with a deficit on the scoreboard.
San Diego finished the regular season with the best bullpen ERA by a very wide margin, and so far, that has translated to postseason play. The Padres bullpen retired 15 of the 17 Cubs batters they faced on Wednesday afternoon, slamming the door closed on a 3-0 win in relief of Dylan Cease.
As Darvish returns to Wrigley, Cubs fans will hope Craig Counsell’s lineup gives him a rude welcome — because this is the kind of October matchup that will end one team’s season and propel the other on a deep postseason run. One thing is certain: if Darvish is on, the Cubs’ path to Milwaukee won’t be easy.