Tatsuya Imai’s first season with the Astros did not give the club much reason to feel settled about his place in the staff. He opened the year in the rotation, slid out of it, and finished as a lightly used reliever. Houston carried him on the postseason roster, but he never got into the Wild Card round.
The numbers tell the story pretty plainly: a 4.93 ERA over 76 2/3 innings, 23 outings, and 15 starts. Three times, he couldn’t finish the first inning.
His strikeout rate was a useful 28.7%, but the walks were a nightmare at 15.1%. Over the final two months, he barely saw the mound at all, pitching only eight times.
There is still a decision to come on the three-year, $54MM deal he signed with Houston last winter. Imai can opt out, though it’s difficult to picture him walking away from the $18MM due in 2027.
If he stays, another shot in the rotation should be waiting for him. Behind Hunter Brown, the Astros’ list of possible starters is thin and hardly intimidating: Hayden Wesneski, Cristian Javier, Ronel Blanco, Ethan Pecko, Mike Burrows, and Kai-Wei Teng.
If Imai is going to hold a rotation job, the offseason work starts with a third pitch. He relied on his four-seamer and slider almost 90% of the time this year, and that’s a tough way to survive against big-league lineups.
The slider was the real weapon. It drew a near-40% whiff rate and held hitters to a .167 average.
The fastball didn’t come close to matching it. His four-seamer sat at 94.8 mph with above-average armside run, but it produced a Run Value of zero, allowed a .280 batting average, and gave up a 47% hard-hit rate.
Two-pitch starters can work, but only when both pitches are borderline dominant. The early versions of Spencer Strider and Hunter Greene are the kind of template Imai would like to follow.
The wrinkle here is that he technically already throws more than two pitches. Baseball Savant lists a sinker, splitter, and changeup in his mix at 2-5%, along with six curveballs.
The offspeed looks were mostly reserved for left-handed hitters. He hardly ever used them against righties, which makes solving lefties a major part of the puzzle.
Same-handed hitters gave him more trouble than righties, though he still managed to hold them to a .604 OPS and strike them out at a 30.6% clip. Left-handers posted a .714 OPS and a 27.5% strikeout rate.
The raw bat-missing ability is real. Imai finished in the 94th percentile with a 32.7% whiff rate and logged a 13.1% swinging-strike rate.
The problem is everything that came before the miss: the walks, the counts, the constant traffic. Among pitchers with at least 70 innings, nobody walked a higher percentage of hitters.
His 59.5% strike rate simply wasn’t good enough. He also ranked in the 8th percentile with a 44.1% hard-hit rate.
One possible fix is to lean more on the sinker. The sample is small, but that pitch produced a 54.1% zone rate, which was his best mark aside from the handful of curveballs. Houston already showed with Hunter Brown that a fastball adjustment can change a pitcher’s path, with Brown’s jump fueled by moving away from the four-seamer and toward more sinkers.
If the rotation route still doesn’t take, the bullpen might. Imai posted a 2.00 ERA in 18 relief innings, though the control issues followed him there too - 11 walks in those appearances.
Even so, the shorter role would suit the two-pitch profile better than starting, and the Astros could use help there. Josh Hader anchors the back end, but Bryan Abreu, Steven Okert, and Enyel De Los Santos are all headed for free agency.
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