The night before Yu Darvish threw the final rehab tone of his painful and awkward 2018 season, I was at Wrigley Field, behind Jed Hoyer at a Pearl Jam concert.
As I woke up early and ate to go to South Bend, Ind., Hoyer, then the general manager and now the president of baseball operations, said he would watch Darvish leave home, probably with a hangover.
I’m not sure how late his internet connection was, but I think I was the one who texted him that Cubs coach Matt Johnson was examining Darvish in the second half of that start. Darvish will leave the game on August 19 and return in 2019.
And now Hoyer should feel bad because he just turned Darvish into a business that has a tough 2021 season, and maybe beyond, for the Cubs.
As of this writing, Darvish is in the process of being traded to the San Diego Padres in a classic business present for the future. The chicks returned to the reconstruction game. They…