Both were effective for him in 2025; of the 460 changeups and splitters I was able to track, Imai registered a 31% zone-whiff rate and 18% swinging strike rate with a batting average allowed of roughly .080 and only one extra base hit.<\/p>\n
Imai\u2019s Outlook<\/p>\n
One of the more unique arms I have assessed in a while, Imai presents some fascinating questions for teams to answer as the bidding for his services continues up until his January 2 signing deadline.<\/p>\n
In speaking to industry sources, there is some skepticism in regards to how the fastball will play, but I lean towards those concerns being overblown. <\/p>\n
While there\u2019s hardly any comps for the slider, there are examples of fastballs similar to Imai\u2019s succeeding at similar or lower velocities. An important wrinkle though, is that each of those pitchers (Ryan, Castillo, Ortiz) all mix in sinkers at least 10-15% of the time.<\/p>\n
We have a fairly large data set of pitchers coming over from NPB to MLB in recent years, with nearly every arm angle seeing their whiff rate increase by a few percentage points on average, and Imai could skew towards the high end of outcomes given the presumed impending reward for elevating his fastball more.<\/p>\n
Even with the career-low walk rate in 2025, I believe the biggest hurdles for Imai will be command and managing lefties. His lower arm angle seems to have created a more natural throw for him, but there will be an added importance on locating his fastball in the upper portion of the zone and the sinker he may add at the lower third of the zone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Both were effective for him in 2025; of the 460 changeups and splitters I was able to track,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-353947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}