Baseball fans in both Japan and the United States will be watching to see how many American batters can get on base or whether Darvish, a strikeout king in Japan, can continue at his specialty in the United States.
Darvish has a larger variety of pitches than most pitchers, often leaving the opposition confused. And he has a fastball that can smoke passed batters at 95 miles an hour.
Reuters reported on Darvish last week, saying, “For a player who has yet to pitch in a regular season game, the buzz around Darvish is deafening.” The fan anticipation—especially but not exclusively in Texas—is at a high level.
It is fair to say that apart from President Ahmadi-nejad, Yu Darvish is the best-known living Iranian among Americans. But most Americans think of him as Japanese because that is where he was raised and because he came out of Japanese baseball.
Yu’s father is Iranian-born and his mother is Japanese. They met while attending college in Florida.