Shota Imanaga Needs to Make His Curveball More of a True Weapon

[Matthew Trueblood]

A three-run lead disappeared in the blink of an eye for the Cubs Thursday afternoon, when an 0-2 fastball to Jorge Soler started a string of scoring plays that negated a 3-0 advantage the Cubs had built in the third frame. It was the latest in a string of instances recently in which the team's ace needed to trust a tertiary pitch a little bit more.

Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports

It's fair to characterize Shota Imanaga's pitch usage this season as overwhelmingly reliant on two pitches: his good, high-ride, high-spin, flat-VAA fastball, and his unique lefty splitter. It's no surprise that he would lean on those offerings; he's been extremely effective that way. As recently as two starts ago, his ERA was under 2.00, and he was in the running for the NL Cy Young Award, not to mention Rookie of the Year.

He was cruising again Thursday, with fewer than 60 pitches thrown through five scoreless innings and a comfortable lead with which to work. Then, after a couple of runners reached base and he got within one strike of getting out of the sixth unscathed, Imanaga gave up an automatic double to Jorge Soler. That put one run on the board. A wild pitch and an infield hit later, the score was tied.

It was the 0-2 pitch on which Soler hit the ball on a hard line to the warning track in left-center that broke the inning open. After two quick, two-pitch outs against Soler early in the game, Imanaga went to five pitches in the third look, and Soler was finally able to take the measure of his high heat.

As you can see, Soler had gotten a solitary glimpse of a sweeper in the second at-bat, and he saw a splitter in both the first and third times up. Six of the nine pitches Imanaga threw him, however, were fastballs. That's not unusual. Imanaga feels comfortable moving the fastball around the zone, and when he thinks a right-handed hitter is sitting on the splitter, he'll throw them a lot of heaters, trying to keep them on the defensive by varying the location.

In choosing to stick to the fastball when the splitter doesn't feel like the right choice, though, Imanaga is overlooking the other viable option: his curve. Fifty times this year, he's thrown curves to righties, and he rarely gets hurt on the pitch:

However, it's also the furthest possible thing from being an out pitch for him. In fact, he's only gotten one out with the curve against righties this year, and he's yet to get a strikeout with it. Why? Because he's using it exclusively as a show-me pitch, trying to steal a called strike early in counts. Of those 50 pitches:

• 38 were on the first pitch of a plate appearance
• 3 were on 0-1
• 3 were on 1-0
• 4 were on 1-1

Only twice all season has Imanaga thrown a righty a curveball as the fourth or later pitch in a plate appearance. On May 29, he threw one in the dirt on 2-2 against the Brewers' Gary Sánchez, and on Jun. 9, he threw a 2-1 curve to Stuart Fairchild, who fouled it off. Imanaga has no confidence at all in his curve, save as a change of speeds right at the front end of a plate appearance.

He's not totally wrong to feel that way. The pitch is not devastating or sharp. In 11 swings, no righty has whiffed on the pitch all season. It's been six foul balls and five balls in play, and while none of those five have been very dangerous, that profile doesn't engender much confidence.

However, the third time through and in such a big spot, you don't need a batter to whiff. Soler was clearly looking for a fastball he could get on top of, and keying on the ball up to know when it was that and not a splitter. In that moment, he might have jumped at the ball a bit and whiffed, even though no one else has yet. Many whiffs and mishits come from a hitter's anxiety, and the curve could increase and prey upon that anxiety for Imanaga in clutch situations. More likely, and more sustainably, though, Soler might have seen the curve as an errant fastball out of the hand and been locked up, leading to what would have been the 22nd called strike of the season on that pitch. Hitters don't just stare at those first-pitch curveballs because they're eager to get back to hitting Imanaga's almost unhittable fastball-splitter combo. They let it go because they're fooled, however briefly, by a pitch that departs from the profile and the expectations they have when they go up there against him.

You're going to have hitters putting on more emergency hacks in two-strike counts than on 0-0, 0-1, or 1-0. But you're still going to get some freezes, and even when batters do swing, they'll suffer from having been ready for two other pitches, but not that one. Imanaga's curve, like his sweeper, is an extra pitch. His fastball and splitter are the big moneymakers. Yet, he has to learn to get more value from those breaking balls, and that means throwing them in more important stages of both an at-bat and a game. Thursday was a perfect object lesson in the importance of that adjustment.

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