Yu Darvish's Replacement in San Diego Could Come in the Form of Another Japanese Pitcher from the Cubs

[Brandon Glick]

Shota Imanaga is now a free agent after the Chicago Cubs declined his three-year, $57 million team option and Imanaga responded by declining a player option of his own. It's a rather shocking turn of events after the Japanese southpaw clearly took charge as the ace of the staff in 2024, but significant struggles down the stretch of the 2025 season swung the pendulum all the way in the other direction.

His free-agent case will be a fascinating one, and not only because of the huge disparity between his performance in the first half (2.65 ERA) and second half (4.70 ERA) of this season. He's a 32-year-old that relies on movement and precision rather than raw stuff, hence why his fastball run value graded out as one of the worst in the majors while his secondary pitches were some of the best. Interested parties will have to believe in his approach to invest in him at his age.

Could San Diego be one of those parties? They're set to lose one or both of Michael King and Dylan Cease in free agency this offseason, and Yu Darvish is now guaranteed to be out for all of 2026 after undergoing elbow surgery. Imanaga, who has made 54 starts and thrown 318.0 innings since arriving in the major leagues prior to the 2024 season, could prove to be a reliable presence in a rotation that needs one in the worst way.

Of course, the Padres were one of the teams that most heavily scouted Imanaga when he was in Japan, as they are wont do with NPB stars. In a world where the Los Angeles Dodgers have become Japan's favorite MLB team — the presence of Shohei Ohtani alone would guarantee that — San Diego may have interest in getting Darvish a native teammate.

Signing Imanaga wouldn't topple the Dodgers' Asian monopoly, but there'd at least be some competition in the NL West, and the hype surrounding starts featuring Imanaga and one of Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, or Roki Sasaki would be immeasurable. It's an easy way to grow the fanbase internationally, especially if the Padres can help the free-agent southpaw find his 2024 form.

That season, Imanaga's first stateside, the left-handed starter logged a 2.91 ERA in 173 1/3 innings, finishing fifth in Cy Young Award voting as a "rookie". He gave up a bunch of home runs, but he also led the league in strikeout to walk ratio (6.21) that season and didn't walk more than three batters in any start all year long. In fact, he issued one or fewer free passes in 23 of his 29 starts that season. His command of the strike zone was immaculate, even if hitters took advantage of his mistakes.

That mostly continued this year — outside of his first start of the year during the Tokyo Series in Japan, he limited his walks to three or fewer in each appearance once again — but his mistakes became more frequent, and opposing batters became far better at taking advantage of them.

As I said on North Side Baseball (article linked above) once both sides opted out of his contract: "Over his final nine starts of the regular season, Imanaga allowed at least one home run in every appearance, including multi-homer efforts in five of his final six starts. That trend continued into the playoffs, as the lefty surrendered three home runs in just 6 2/3 frames, including two in less than three innings against the Brewers in Game 2 of the NLDS. The Cubs declined his option today, but they had made their decision on Imanaga weeks ago."

That last sentence was in reference to the team's decision not to use him at all on full rest in the decisive Game 5 of the NLDS, as the Cubs opted for a bullpen game in the sudden-death affair. Other teams surely saw that decision and recognized that something within Imanaga's approach was deeply broken toward the end of the 2025 campaign.

Still, Imanaga was brilliant just a few months ago, as he allowed a scant .299 slugging percentage and 2.65 ERA in August. The wheels didn't come off until the very end of the year, but once they were gone, there was no getting them back on. Year over year, Imanaga got worse across the board in his second MLB season, besides the fact that he upped his in-zone rate (i.e., pitches thrown in the strike zone) from 51.7% to 54.0%. Considering how much of an issue he had on limiting authoritative, damaging swings, his next team will likely focus on helping him play more to his already-elite chase rates (31.6% in 2025, 34.8% in 2024).

One wrinkle in all of this is that the Cubs somewhat surprisingly gave Imanaga the qualifying offer, which is worth about $22 million this offseason. There's no guarantee he turns that down (the option he declined was worth $15 million), but even if he does, he'll now be attached to draft pick compensation as a free agent. I sincerely doubt that'll be enough to scare off A.J. Preller and the Padres, but it could dissuade them from outbidding other teams for his services.

There's a lot of good and some very off-putting bad in Imanaga's profile, and the Padres may be wise to favor adding younger pitchers to their exceedingly older staff. There's a pitcher in him that could join Nick Pivetta in rounding out the top of San Diego's rotation, but as spectators saw during the final months of this past season, there's also a pitcher who serves up rather tasty meatballs to ravenous hitters. If Craig Stammen and Ruben Niebla think they can coax the former out more often that the latter, Imanaga could be a solid under-the-radar target to pursue for a team that tends to prefer louder, more bombastic acquisitions.

View full article