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While he won't sign for anywhere near as much money as the Dodgers recently gave Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga is an exciting talent in his own right. No pitcher who appeared in last year's World Baseball Classic showed better raw stuff than Imanaga. His fastball was cranked up into the mid-90s, and spinning at the top of the zone with movement that no other hurler on Earth can match. He missed bats with his splitter, slider, and curveball. That international success was an affirmation of the impressive numbers he put up in NPB competition for the few years before that, and he further proved his excellence by having his best campaign to date in NPB last season.
That said, the stuff Imanaga showed in shorter bursts and with the adrenaline of a postseason atmosphere in the WBC shouldn't be expected to translate perfectly to MLB. His average fastball velocity last year in NPB was more like 92 miles per hour than 94, where he was sitting in the WBC. That difference matters, obviously. So does the fact that, given Imanaga's stuff profile, his greatest vulnerability is to the home run. If that was true in NPB, it will certainly be so in MLB, and that could limit his upside.
Still, we're talking about special stuff. Imanaga led NPB in strikeout rate in 2023, and that was with a more fastball-forward mix than we should expect to see him use in MLB. Even without average-plus velocity, he's going to have success and miss bats with his fastball, because the thing takes off like a jet at the top of the zone. Last year, 360 pitchers threw at least 200 four-seamers in MLB. Only one (Baltimore closer Felix Bautista) got more rising action on his fastball than did Imanaga at the WBC. We shouldn't expect Imanaga to sustain quite that much carry over a full MLB season, but he'd certainly land somewhere in the top five percent of all hurlers in this regard.
The top 25 players on the aforementioned list of 360 got whiffs on an average of 23.7 percent of opponents' swings against the fastball. That's solidly north of 21.3 percent, the median mark for the league. In other words, carry on the fastball means whiffs, and Imanaga has carry, so he will get whiffs. The question will be whether he can accustom himself to pitching more carefully, to account for the fact that MLB hitters have more power and can punish even slight mistakes more thunderously than NPB hitters typically do. That means going to the fastball less often in traditional fastball counts, and showing sufficient command of his four or five other pitches to throw them for strikes on the edges of the zone.
For Cubs fans who long for more swing-and-miss out of the starting rotation, Imanaga holds obvious appeal. He's likely to get a nine-figure deal, but he could be well worth that. He's going to rack up strikeouts, and he was tremendous at limiting walks in NPB. He'll have to give up a little of that zone-pounding mentality in order to adapt to MLB, but that might only let him strike out hitters more effectively.
If he's a high-strikeout, low-walk, low-BABIP, high-home run rate guy, that's the sketch of an effective pitcher. It could take a broad range of specific forms, with the value he provides varying widely. A handful of similar hurlers to consider (from least to most exciting) include Drew Smyly, Kenta Maeda, Michael Pineda, Masahiro Tanaka, and Kevin Gausman. There's legitimate frontline starting upside, and if he can stay healthy on an MLB rotation schedule, the floor is relatively high.
Imanaga has never made more than 25 starts or thrown more than 170 innings in a single season. In one reading, that's discouraging, because he certainly doesn't profile as a workhorse, the way a team might prefer a pitcher to if they're going to commit more than $20 million per year for five years. Given his size (5-foot-10, 176 pounds), that wouldn't be a fair expectation, anyway. In another reading, though, that means that the odometer on his arm is much less daunting than those of some other pitchers just entering their 30s. He might hold up unexpectedly well, just because he hasn't been asked to shoulder heavy workloads during his 20s.
How much would you pay for Imanaga? Is he atop your list of remaining free-agent targets for the Cubs?
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