San Francisco Giants free-agent profile: Shota Imanaga -

There’s still a chance that the San Francisco Giants will sign Yoshinobu Yamamoto. They’ve reportedly offered him at least $300 million, and even the grouchiest grouch has to admit that there’s a certain kind of romance and challenge that comes with the best Japanese pitcher in the majors choosing the blood rival of the best Japanese hitter in the majors. Joining the Los Angeles Dodgers would be boring. Joining the Giants guarantees a series of high-profile showdowns that would be like the Super Bowl of American baseball. This all makes sense! You have to believe, man!

OK, so the Giants probably won’t sign Yamamoto. He’s already met with the New York Mets and New York Yankees for a second time, and it sure seems like both teams are pinning all of their remaining offseason hopes on him. And instead of a challenge, maybe Yamamoto is looking to join a team with a chance to annihilate everyone they face, which would be the Dodgers. This would leave the Giants short in their efforts to create a Rotation of Doom™, which is just about the only way they can compete for a postseason spot next season.

We’ve already looked at what they can do in free agency and on the trade market to build their rotation, but left-hander Shota Imanaga deserves a closer look, especially because there are actually rumors about him and the Giants.

The Giants have shown interest in free agent starter Shōta Imanaga, whose market is likely to clarify once Yamamoto agrees to his contract.@MLBNetwork @MLB

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) December 16, 2023

He was my fourth preference a couple of weeks ago, behind Yamamoto, Blake Snell and a trade for Corbin Burnes. After doing the research for this article, he is no longer fourth. Did he move up or down? You’ll just have to read. Or skip to the end. Hopefully, you’ll read it and agree, however. Here are the pros and cons of Imanaga getting a long-term deal from the Giants.

Why the Giants would want Shota Imanaga

Yamamoto is unfathomably talented. Roki Sasaki — who wants to be posted next offseason — might be even more talented. Their pure stuff is as good or even better as any pitcher’s in the world.

Which is why it’s wild that during the World Baseball Classic in the spring, neither one of them ranked at the top of this list:

Final WBC Stuff+ leaders, minimum 28 pitches per appearance:
1) Shoto Imanaga
2) Yoshinobo Yamamoto
3) Jose De Leon
4) Julio Urias
5) Yu Darvish
6) Sandy Alcantara
7) Cristian Javier
8) Jose Urquidy
9) Shohei Ohtani
10) Luis Garcia
11) Roki Sasaki

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) March 22, 2023

You can find definitions and explanations of Stuff+ and Pitching+ by reading Eno here and here, with a detailed primer on FanGraphs. The short version is that it’s looking at a pitcher’s … stuff. How much movement he’s getting on various pitches, spin rate, velocity, et cetera. Smart people take this data, put it all in a blender and come up with a number. And according to this method, Imanaga had the nastiest pitches in the world. Or, at least, the World Baseball Classic.

Now, this was a small sample, and I don’t actually believe that he has better stuff than Yamamoto, but it’s impossible to fake your way to the top of that list. If you like stuff, and I know you do, it’s not Yamamoto-or-bust. Imanaga will make major leaguers look silly, and he’ll probably do it often.

Imanaga throws his four-seam fastball more than 50 percent of the time, and while it averages just 92 MPH, it has glove-side run and gets some of his swings and misses. Here was Mike Trout’s introduction to it:

If you ignore Imanaga’s height and arm slot and just look at the characteristics of the pitch, it sure looks like a Madison Bumgarner four-seamer. But for a pitch that’s thrown more than 50 percent of the time, it doesn’t get a ton of whiffs when batters swing — just 21.2 percent, according to Baseball Data House. That would rank 22nd in MLB, which isn’t bad, but we can assume that the swinging strike rate will go down once he’s actually pitching in MLB.

It’s a good thing that he has outstanding complementary pitches, then. His splitter is nasty, getting whiffs on 42 percent of swings against it, and his slider isn’t far behind, with a 35.9 percent swinging strike rate. The splitter whiff rate is comparable to Kevin Gausman’s last year, and the slider’s was close to Clayton Kershaw’s. Again, those numbers will drop in MLB, but probably not by that much. He even has a Zack Greinke-like eephus-curve that he’ll float in for a strike every so often, which sounds amazingly entertaining. Sports Info Solutions has a detailed look at all of his pitches, including his rarely-used changeup. (Note: in the link to Baseball Data House, it suggests that Imanaga is throwing a change, not a splitter, but I think that’s a translation error.)

All of this added up to the highest strikeout rate in the Central League last season and the fifth-highest strikeout rate overall. If you’re assuming that he’s a solid, command-and-control lefty, someone like Eduardo Rodriguez or Martín Pérez, that might be underrating him. Thar’s swing-and-miss in them hills.

Imanaga has excellent control, too, walking 2.4 batters per nine innings over his career, but improving that to 1.6 over the last two seasons.

A Cy Young Award winner? Probably not. An All-Star? That’s within reason, albeit a touch optimistic. A complement to Logan Webb, Alex Cobb, Kyle Harrison and perhaps another starting pitcher? Heck, yeah. It’s not hard to see what the Giants would see in him, and even though he’s 30 — five years older than Yamamoto — he seems like he would be a reliable option with upside, which is exactly what the rotation needs after Webb. That’s even if the Giants sign Yamamoto or trade for someone like Dylan Cease.

Seems like a great fit. Now to address the elephant over the fence.

Why the Giants wouldn’t want Shota Imanaga

Dingers. Dude gives up dingers.

The NPB is going through something of a dead-ball era at the moment. Sasaki allowed one homer this year in 91 innings; Yamamoto allowed two in 164 innings. Among the 57 pitchers who threw more than 45 innings in the Central League, only 14 of them had a HR/9 of 1.0 or higher. Imanaga was one of them, with a rate that was higher than Tyler Beede’s for perspective.

Now, a 1.0 HR/9 rate isn’t bad on its own — it would have been the 18th-best rate in the majors last year — but the context of the dead ball matters. Viva El Birdos looked at how other Japanese starters fared in the majors when it came to home runs, and they found that all of their rates more than doubled. If that held true for Imanaga, he’d have something like a 2.0 HR/9, which is unsustainable. That’s Lance Lynn and Jordan Lyles territory, where teams can put up with it for only so long.

This is the only problem with Imanaga that I could find, but it’s a doozy. A high strikeout rate is awesome, but it would all be spoiled if he’s allowing two homers every game. The team that signs him would have to make sure they have a plan for him to keep the ball in the park.

Verdict

A team that can help pitchers keep the ball in the park, you say? Now you’re playing the Giants’ song. It’s not as if Oracle Park is as pitcher-friendly as it was before they moved the center field fences in, but it’s still plenty friendly. The next season Oracle Park plays as an above-average ballpark for home runs will be the first. There might not be a better ballpark for a pitcher with dingeritis.

What I keep going back to, however, is Imanaga’s fastball-heavy approach. His splitter and slider are world-class pitches, but he’s using them almost exclusively ahead in the count. They’re his kill pitches.

You know the Giants would looooooove to mess with that.

Kevin Gausman’s transformation into Kevin Freaking Gausman began with his ability to throw his splitter for strikes, whether he was ahead or behind in the count. The same thing happened with Alex Cobb; batters can’t just see the split early and assume it’s going in the dirt. If Imanaga’s splitter is even close to that good, he’ll get swings and misses on them in the strike zone. The Giants have made pitchers wealthy and sent them to All-Star Games by highlighting their split-fingered fastball.

They should do it again. The more I look into Imanaga, it’s possible that he’s the second-best pitcher still available to the Giants, after only Yamamoto. I’ll take Imanaga over Blake Snell, for sure, and a trade for Cease or Corbin Burnes would only move ahead of him if the Giants can swing it without emptying the top of the farm system.

Hope for Yamamoto, even if it’s not as realistic. But don’t be disappointed in Imanaga. Slotting him between Webb and Cobb would give teams a lot of different looks in a three-game series. He’s not a consolation prize; he’s just one of the prizes remaining.

Previous San Francisco Giants free-agent profiles

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, RHP
Shohei Ohtani, RHP/DH
Matt Chapman, 3B
Blake Snell, LHP
Cody Bellinger, OF/1B
Jung Hoo Lee, CF

(Photo of Imanaga pitching at the World Baseball Classic: Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press)

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