Showtime: A Japanese Star Is Ready for His Close-up HONG KONG - Every baseball player who makes it to the Show has stellar credentials. All the pitchers in the major leagues have a zillion strikeouts, and all the hitters have piles of home runs or a great slugging percentage. They're also likely to have outstanding stats in categories like DIPS, OPS, BABIP and VORP - the arcane indices made popular by Moneyball. But there's essentially one number that has all of American baseball buzzing - and all of Japan, for that matter. That number is 97. As in miles per hour. Or 156 kilometers per hour. Which is the speed of the high-end fastballs thrown by the Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish. As pitches go, 97 is about as fast as it gets - about half as fast as the speediest shinkansen, Japan's legendary bullet trains. Mr. Darvish, 25, the son of a Japanese mother and an Iranian father, is already seen by some baseball cognoscenti as the best Japanese pitcher ever. He is set to make his first major league start on Monday, pitching at home for the Texas Rangers, who paid more than $107 million to sign him away from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. Mr. Darvish will lead the Rangers against the Seattle Mariners and their aging but splendid Japanese star, Ichiro Suzuki, 38, now in his 12th Major League season. There are 17 Japanese players currently listed as active members of Major League rosters, according to a Web site that tracks them. "Even now, after spring training, my delivery doesn't feel 100 percent," Mr. Darvish said through his interpreter, Joe Furukawa, quoted by Evan Grant, the Rangers beat writer for The Dallas Morning News. There really is no way to describe how you feel during the middle of the season compared to right now. But I've done all the preparation and I'm ready to go. I'm ready for battle. It has been a whirlwind of a spring for Mr. Darvish, a righthander, who stands 6-foot-5. He and his wife, Saeko, an actress in Japan, divorced in January, the same day he signed with the Rangers, according to the Kyodo News agency. They have two sons. A restaurant near the Rangers" stadium in Arlington, Texas, has named a burger after the new pitcher - it's called the Darvicious, with a picture of the highly vertical monstrosity here - and the mayor of Arlington told Japanese reporters the city could name a street after Mr. Darvish - if he lives up to expectations. The flame-haired Mr. Darvish has had to adjust to Texas, to new teammates and coaches, and to the larger fields and softer pitching mounds of Major League Baseball. The actual baseballs, too, are bigger, and not as hard as those used in the Japanese leagues. Before Mr. Darvish signed with the Rangers, some scouting reports put his weight at 185 pounds, or 84 kilograms. The Rangers" roster now lists him at 215. Weight training? Barbecue? In his spring training debut on March 7 against San Diego, televised live in Japan at 4 a.m., Mr. Darvish pitched from the stretch the whole time - unusual for an American pitcher but something he said he does when his mechanics are off. His fastball was averaging 94 m.p.h., and he showed a good command of four other pitches. Here was the takeaway on that first appearance from Jonah Keri on Grantland: Overall, it was a treat to watch. When he pitched, everyone was transfixed. You didn't see fans texting or going for hot dogs when he was out there. The crowd oohed and aahed at his array of slow curves and darting changeups, and cheered loudly when he entered and exited the game, the only notable noise on a spookily quiet afternoon at the ballpark. When Darvish toes the mound next month for his first start that counts, you'll have the same reaction. Few pitchers combine superior natural talent with an ability to make pitches sit up and do tricks. Darvish does. You're going to love watching this guy pitch. Jerry Crasnick, a senior writer for ESPN.com, offered this assessment of the young fireballer after that first appearance: At the moment, Darvish's biggest challenge is deciding how much of his personality he wants to reveal. He never smiles and is extremely guarded in interviews, and when everything is funneled through an interpreter, it's inevitable that minor misunderstandings will mushroom into something bigger. Darvish is inherently confident, and there might come a point when his self-assuredness comes across as cockiness or aloofness. Can Darvish find the right balance between satisfying the media and a rabid fan base and wrapping himself in the protective cocoon he'll need to focus on the business at hand? Meanwhile, as my colleague Brad Lefton writes from Nago, Japan, there is plenty of buzz about another young pitcher, Yuki Saito, who set records as a schoolboy and went 6-6 as a rookie last year for Mr. Darvish's former club.