Kohei Arihara Of The Texas Rangers

Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighter pitcher Kohei Arihara has signed a two year contract with the Texas Rangers.  Arihara was selected by four teams in the first round of the 2014 draft - the Fighters, the Carp, the Tigers and the Baystars - and the Fighters won the lottery for his rights.  He debuted with the ichi-gun team the following May and ended up going 8-6 with a 4.79 ERA in 18 starts which doesn't sound all that good but it was a good enough performance to be named Rookie Of The Year that season.  His best two seasons were 2016 when he went 11-9 with a 2.94 ERA and 2019 when he went 15-8 with a 2.48 ERA.  He was an All Star in both of those seasons and his 15 wins led the PL in 2019.

Arihara's first cards predate his NPB playing career.  BBM did sets for the Tokyo Big Six collegiate league between 2008 and 2013 and Arihara appears in the last three sets they did (2011 Autumn Version, 2012 and 2013).  He's the first player featured in one of those sets to sign with an MLB team.  Here are his three collegiate cards:

2011 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #26

2012 BBM Tokyo Big Six #07

2013 BBM Tokyo Big Six #10

His first NPB card is #023 from the 2015 BBM Rookie Edition set.  Other 2015 cards for him include BBM's 1st Version (#073), 2nd Version (#409), Fighters (#F06) and Genesis (#020) sets, Calbee's Series One set (#019) and Bandai's Owners League 02 set (#25).  He's been in every BBM 1st and 2nd Version set since he began his career and had at least one Calbee card every year as well.  He's also been in all three Epoch NPB sets.  Trading Card Database has a fairly complete list of his cards.  Here's some of his cards - you can see that some of his cards suffer from a lack of variety of poses:

2015 BBM Rookie Edition #023

2015 BBM 1st Version #073

2015 Calbee #019

2016 Calbee "Title Holder" #T-02

2017 BBM Fighters #F07

2018 BBM/Nippon-Ham Home Run Sausage #2018-N06

2018 Konami Baseball Collection #201810-N-F016

2019 BBM Fusion "Title Holder" #TH17

2020 Epoch NPB #149

I took the photo at the top of the page when Arihara was pitching against the Lotte Giants in Peoria, Arizona during early spring training back in 2016.