Breaking Down Offseason Targets - Shota Imanaga

Yoshinobu Yamamoto may be the top Japanese arm on the market this winter but he isn’t the only one. 30-year-old Shota Imanaga may not be as good of a pitcher but he brings a similar level of stuff to the table and should sign a significantly smaller deal. That makes him an interesting option for the teams that missed out on Yamamoto or for the teams that don’t want to surrender a draft pick with any potential signing.

The St. Louis Cardinals could very easily fall into one or both of those categories.

Before I keep going with a breakdown of Imanaga, I’ll mention that this is the 5th breakdown I’ve done in this series. If you want to read my breakdown of Blake Snell, Sonny Gray, Aaron Nola, or Yoshinobu Yamamoto, just click on the name of the player you’re interested in.

Now, let’s get to the breakdown.

Background

Looking at Imanaga’s career stats, it’s clear that he’s not as good of an arm as Yamamoto. He’s just not. I’ve seen it mentioned in some places that Imanaga and Yamamoto are pretty comparable and that’s fine if you want to think that, but Yamamoto is clearly better and it’s not particularly close.

That doesn’t mean that Imanaga is bad, though. It just means that Yamamoto is really good (and the top pitcher on the market this year) and Imanaga is “just” good.

Imanaga’s career 2.96 ERA is solid and his 2.66 ERA in the 2023 season is even better, but, with that said, neither of those numbers compare to Yamamoto’s 1.72 career ERA or 1.16 ERA this past season.

The best way to think about these two pitchers is that Imanaga is not a substitute for Yamamoto. Rather, he’s more of a consolation prize if you miss out on Yamamoto.

With that being said, there’s one huge caveat. Imanaga might not be as good as Yamamoto, but from a pure stuff perspective he might be better.

The 30-year-old actually struck out batters at a higher rate and walk them at a lower rate than Yamamoto this past season.

So how was he worse? The answer is home runs.

Imanaga gave up home runs at a higher-than-average rate in the NPB, which isn’t a particularly power-oriented league, and while Yamamoto allowed just 2 home runs all season, Imanaga allowed 18.

That’s the number that concerns me. And it makes a big difference in Imanaga’s overall numbers.

Take a look at Imanaga’s final NPB season compared to the final seasons of some other Japanese pitchers that have come to the majors recently. (This is the same table I used in my Yamamoto article but now it includes Imanaga.)

Only two pitchers on this list struck out hitters at a higher rate - Shohei Ohtani and Yu Darvish - while none of them walked batters at a lower rate. If you just looked at those numbers, it would be reasonable to think that Imanaga is the best pitcher on this list.

The difference is that no other pitcher had a home run rate higher than 0.4 HR/9. Imanaga’s is more than twice that and, as a result, he has the highest ERA of the group, with a pretty large gap between his ERA (2.66) and the next highest ERA (Kenta Maeda at 2.09).

So that’s the good and the bad of Imanaga. It’s easy to dream on his combination of stuff and control but the home runs are concerning and can’t just be ignored.

To understand my concern, take a look at the table below, showing the home run rates of the players above in their final NPB season and then the home run rates of those same players in both their first MLB season and their entire MLB career.

Notice that every player’s home run rate at least doubled? Well, if Imanaga’s home run rate doubled, he would be giving up 2 home runs every 9 innings. That’s not a great recipe for production as a pitcher.

We could look at this another way and say that each pitcher’s HR/9 rose between 0.47 and 0.8. That would put Imanaga’s home run rate between 1.47 and 1.8.

I’m not saying that’s going to happen. In fact, there are a lot of problems with the approach I’m taking. For starters, the sample size is tiny, but, even beyond that, each player is different. Shota Imanaga is not Yu Darvish who is not Kodai Senga. We can make a projection based on other high profile NPB pitchers but that doesn’t mean Imanaga is going to translate the same way.

Regardless, the MLB average HR/9 this year was 1.23 so it won’t take much for Imanaga to give up home runs at a higher than average rate. The question is simply, how many home runs will he give up. If Imanaga turns out to only be slightly below average, then he has a good enough combination of stuff and control to make up for it but if he turns out to be well below average rate, then it may truly be a limiting factor.

I’ve spent enough time discussing home runs, though. We should also look at strikeouts and walks because that’s where Imanaga excels. In fact, he’s even better than Yamamoto in both aspects and Yamamoto will sign for $200+ million. That’s the appeal of Imanaga. It’s that a team who misses on Yamamoto, or may have simply been priced out of his market, can go get someone with more strikeouts and fewer walks at a cheaper price.

That sounds good to me.

I wish I had seen more of Imanaga to be able to understand his home run problem but if the Cardinals have scouted him and have an idea for how to combat it, then this is a signing that could very easily add a lot of value to the team at a lesser cost than would be required to sign the top names on the market.

Something else I want to add is that, like Yamamoto, Imanaga also has a slight frame, standing at just 5’10” and 176 pounds. Some teams may be a bit nervous about his size on top of the durability concerns with pitching more frequently but Imanaga has been durable throughout his career which should help alleviate some of those concerns.

Arsenal

Again, I’ve haven’t seen enough of Imanaga to truly provide a scouting report on him but I do have some stuff+ data from his World Baseball Classic outings.

This comes with all the same caveats as when I discussed Yamamoto’s stuff+ grades so I won’t mention them again, but, small sample size or no, it’s pretty clear that Imanaga is nasty.

I’m pretty much going to ignore all the pitches with a sample size of 2 but I do want to point out that Imanaga seems pretty good at manipulating his pitch shapes, hence the large arsenal. His split-change is probably his best secondary right now as his breaking balls are a little slow and loopy for my liking.

He really loves to throw that split-change down and away and is effective at locating it there while he’s also really good at spotting his fastball to both sides of the plate. It’s true plus command in his profile.

Keep in mind that I’m basing this on what limited exposure I have to Imanaga, which consists of his World Baseball Classic outings and some other brief highlights I scrounged up on Google.

If I were to make a guess about the home run issue, I would guess that it likely has to do with his breaking balls potentially needing some tweaking but, again, I haven’t seen enough to state that as fact.

What I love about Imanaga is his fastball. The pitch supposedly sits about 94 mph and, aside from the excellent command which I’ve already mentioned, has over 20 inches of induced vertical break. That would put his fastball at least in the top 10 in the majors in terms of IVB.

Between the shape of the pitch and Imanaga’s height (or lack thereof), the pitch should play extremely well up in the zone, which really sets up Imanaga’s secondaries at the knees.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to look at a Cardinals starter and say “he has a really good fastball”, but that’s exactly what we can do with Imanaga. The command and shape of the pitch are excellent and the velocity is enough to the point where I can argue pretty confidently that Imanaga would have the best fastball in the Cardinals rotation.

Pair that with a nasty split-change and workable breaking balls that already seem to measure out well according to stuff+ (albeit in a tiny sample size), and Imanaga becomes a pretty desirable starter.

I’m really excited to be able to get some pitch specs on him when he pitches in his first MLB game and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him have stuff that ranks in the upper echelon of MLB pitchers next year.

Conclusion

At this point, I truly have no idea what a contract for Imanaga would look like. I’ve seen speculation that it could end up around $15 million in AAV and I would guess that he’ll probably get a 4 or 5 year deal, considering he’s already 30 years old.

That’s well within the Cardinals price range.

With that said, I have too many concerns about Imanaga to want him as the #1 pitcher in the rotation next year. I would be perfectly fine with him being the second or third best pitcher the Cardinals bring in this winter but I simply don’t know exactly how well a pitcher with an elevated home run rate in Japan will translate to the majors, a more power oriented league. I also think that he’s likely to get overpaid considering the risk that is in his profile

The stuff is enticing, with the fastball having me particularly excited, and so is his command of both of his fastball and his changeup. I can’t say much about his breaking balls since I’ve only seen a few of them, but on the whole, this is an arm that I want the Cardinals to sign if his price tag is right.

For me, the lefty is in a similar, probably lesser, tier as Sonny Gray. That comes with a caveat, though. Imanaga is the riskier player by far, but while Gray doesn’t carry as much risk, I would bet that Imanaga’s stuff is better. This is where the scouting department can make the difference. If the Cardinals feel comfortable with potentially reshaping Imanaga’s breaking balls and if they feel comfortable that they have a handle on his elevated home run rate, then Imanaga could be a home run signing.

The obvious benefit is that he won’t cost a draft pick and could even end up being cheaper than Gray. Like I said, there’s risk involved, but that makes Imanaga really enticing.

I’ve now covered the 5 main pitchers that I wanted to cover. If there are any more pitchers you would like me to break down, then let me know in the comments. I may continue this series next week or I may wait until the rumor mill starts churning a little bit more and I have a better grasp on who the Cardinals are interested in.

Either way, there are more pitcher breakdowns coming your way so feel free to make suggestions.

Thanks for reading, VEB. Have a great Tuesday.