Padres Free Agency Wish List: Shota Imanaga Is An Underrated Left-Handed Option for Friars' Rotation

The San Diego Padres made an attempt to add a left-handed starter at the trade deadline, but their bet on Robbie Ray failed in his first full season back after Tommy John surgery in 2023. Ray had a 3.59 ERA in 182 1/3 innings for the San Francisco Giants in 2025, but, after arriving in San Diego, he finished allowing a 5.02 ERA in nine starts and was inefficient in the postseason.

So, if the Padres try to find a left-handed arm to balance the rotation, as my colleague @Sam Caulder suggested, Trevor Rogers stands out as the top arm on the free-agent market after Tarik Skubal. Rogers ranks second among the southpaw class in fWAR (4.0), but if he proves to be too expensive, Chicago Cubs Japanese pitcher Shota Imanaga could also be an interesting option for the Friars.

Imanaga was a free agent last winter, after a season-ending stretch in which he showed some improvements by increasing his K-BB% rate from 12.1% to 19.5% and lowering his xFIP to 4.08 after the All-Star break, but his continued problems with home runs were impossible to ignore. His fastball was the real culprit, with just a 15.9% whiff rate, his second-lowest rate in a single season among all his pitches, and he finished the 2025 season allowing 24 home runs and a .594 xSLG on the pitch, a figure fairly close to his 32 strikeouts. In the end, he accepted the Cubs’ $22 million qualifying offer, a deal that ended up working for both sides.

So, after a better performance in 2026, Imanaga is back on the market and has a 2.4 fWAR projection, with notable improvements to his four-seam fastball and elite splitter. He stands out for having a left-handed arm capable of generating chases and whiffs, which he combines with his excellent control to avoid giving up walks.

His average velocity with the four-seam fastball only increased 0.8 mph this year, but what really drove the turnaround was his pitch mix and command. One of his biggest problems in 2025 was not just the home runs he allowed, but that Imanaga completely lost the impact of his fastball inside the strike zone.

On the left is the hot zone for his fastball in 2025, and on the right are this year's chart. As you can appreciate, Imanaga was hit hard and, when pitches stayed middle-middle or in the upper-third of the strike zone, the result was often ineffective, leaving the impression that he was throwing batting practice. This year, he managed to prevent almost all those zones from becoming vulnerable again and, although he allowed 17 home runs, his run value improved from -20 to +2. Along with those improvements to his fastball, the splitter regained a little movement on both planes and continued to be his lethal weapon, recording a run value of +11, higher than the +6 mark it generated in 2025.

His breaking balls were a little less reliable, especially after the sweeper’s decline this year from 8 to -6 run value. However, he can get most hitters out with his signature fastball-splitter combination. Assuming Imanaga can get his sweeper back on track with a new team, he'll have three above-average pitches that account for 89.2% of his repertoire: his four-seam fastball (40.1%), splitter (34.5%) and sweeper (14.6%).

For the Padres, he could be a starter in the middle of the rotation, perhaps as the No. 3 or No. 4, depending on who makes up the rest of the group. With a projected salary between $30 and $38 million over a couple of seasons, he'd be a strong target to bring some left-handed upside to the starting five next year.

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