Japanese pitching star Shota Imanaga likely to be posted by Monday

The Yokohama BayStars of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball are planning to post left-hander Shota Imanaga for major league teams sometime between now and Monday, reports Mark Feinsand of MLB.com. 

While prior reporting had indicated that Imanaga might not be posted until fellow NPB ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto had already signed, it instead appears that Imanaga will be posted about a week after Yamamoto. That creates some overlap in the two posting periods but also gives Imanaga at least a few days for teams that miss out on Yamamoto to explore the possibility of instead signing him.

While both Imanaga and Yamamoto are highly regarded, Imanaga is widely expected to sign the lesser contract in terms of both years and dollars. That’s due partially to the fact that Yamamoto is regarded as the superior pitcher, of course, but the primary reason for Yamamoto being projected to sign a deal more than twice as lucrative as Imanaga is the age gap between the two. Yamamoto just turned 25 in August while Imanaga turned 30 in September.

As such, Imanaga’s age is more in line with that of standard major league free agents, who tend to reach the open market around 30-31 years of age. There are exceptions, but particularly among pitchers, a player reaching the market in his mid-to-late 20s is quite rare.

Although Imanaga doesn’t have the bonus allure of being an atypically young free agent, he nonetheless figures to command a weighty long-term deal himself. The southpaw’s 2023 season featured 148 innings of 2.80 ERA ball — his second straight sub-3.00 mark and his third in five years. (The two other seasons “only” saw Imanaga post marks of 3.08 and 3.23.) Imanaga fanned 29.5% of his opponents this past season against a superlative 3.8% walk rate.

Dating back to 2019, Imanaga boasts a 26.2% strikeout rate and 5.9% walk rate in addition to a cumulative 2.79 earned run average — including a no-hitter in the 2022 season. He isn’t necessarily overpowering in terms of velocity, though MLBTR contributor Dai Takegami Podziewski noted late in the year that he’d added some life to his heater and was averaging between 92-93 mph during the 2023 season. He pairs that heater with a splitter, curveball and cutter/slider hybrid, as noted in Brandon Tew’s breakdown of that 2022 no-hitter over at Sports Info Solutions.

Whenever Imanaga is posted, it will mark the start of a 45-day window for him to negotiate with all 30 MLB clubs. Any team that agrees to sign Imanaga will also be agreeing to pay a release fee to the BayStars — the size of which is dependent on the size of Imanaga’s contract. In addition to the guaranteed money owed to the pitcher himself, his new team will need to pay a release fee equal to 20% of the contract’s first $25M, plus 17.5% of the next $25M and 15% of any dollars thereafter. MLBTR predicted a five-year, $85M contract for the lefty, which would come with a $13.875M release fee owed to the BayStars. Future club/player options and earnings unlocked via incentives/bonuses are also subject to that system (and, in this hypothetical instance, would come with a 15% fee owed to the Yokohama club).

To this point, Imanaga has been linked to several MLB clubs — most recently the Cubs but also the Dodgers and Red Sox. It stands to reason that virtually every mid- or large-market club with a need for pitching will have some degree of interest. Imanaga has been one of the steadiest performers in Japan for the better part of a half decade and has thus been heavily scouted by MLB teams for quite some time. He’ll likely be on the radar for other bigger-spending teams like the Mets, Yankees, Cardinals, Giants, Angels and Blue Jays (to name a few) over the next six to seven weeks.