After seeing the rise of Japanese star baseball players like Shohei Ohtani Yu Darvish, Seiya Suzuki, Kodai Senga, Shota Imanaga, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the trend of Japanese players coming to MLB is bound to continue as teams look for the next star that can help impact their team.
This offseason, a lot of the spotlight is on Munetaka Murakami and where he is going to sign, but there is another player on the rise that should be gaining attention this offseason.
That player is Tatsuya Imai, and the team that should do whatever possible to sign him is the San Francisco Giants.
*THIS IS A PREDICTION, NOT A REPORT*
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The San Francisco Giants are coming off a season in which they ent 81-81, and fell just a few games shy of making the National League Wild Card Series in the MLB Playoffs.
The Giants are trending in the right direction, but still need more work to the team to be fully back on track with becoming contenders. With Buster Posey now having more time as the Giants’ president of baseball operations, he is bound to be more aggressive in building out the team this offseason.
One of the areas that they need major improvement from is their pitching. Posey knows this, especially in a recent comment he made that hinted at this with saying, “We came into the year thinking we had a nice amount of depth and then by the end it didn’t feel like we had a lot of depth. It was definitely a learning experience for me to learn that that old adage ‘you never can have enough pitching’ is definitely true.”
They need depth, but they also need a pitcher that can emerge as a true ace for them. After watching their rivals in the Los Angeles Dodgers win the World Series again, in large part due to the pitching help from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Giants should be doing whatever possible to land their own Japanese pitching star in Tatsuya Imai.
While playing for the Seibu Lions, Tatsuya Imai together an impressive career so far since his start in 2017 at 19 years old. Imai has played in 159 games in NPB action, and over that span he has a 3.15 ERA and 1.267 WHIP with 907 strikeouts while pitching 963.2 innings.
More specifically, Tatsuya Imai is coming off a 2025 season in which he had a 1.92 ERA with a 0.892 WHIP across 163.2 innings. Imai added on 178 strikeouts and just 45 walks while having a 10-5 record. For San Francisco, Imai’s talent would help uplift their pitching rotation for the future, and is why they must do whatever they can to make sure they sign him this offseason.