{"id":509119,"date":"2026-01-07T04:29:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T04:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/509119\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T04:29:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T04:29:19","slug":"how-surprising-was-tatsuya-imai-signing-with-the-houston-astros","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/509119\/","title":{"rendered":"How surprising was Tatsuya Imai signing with the Houston Astros?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yahoo Sports senior MLB analyst Jordan Shusterman and The Athletic’s Astros Beat Writer Chandler Rome discuss Tatsuya Imai\u2019s signing with the Houston Astros and highlight why it’s a good fit for him. Hear the full conversation on the \u201cBaseball Bar-B-Cast\u201d podcast – and subscribe on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you listen.<\/p>\n

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Video Transcript<\/p>\n

… To Tatsuya Imai, the newest member of the Houston Astros.<\/p>\n

This was not something that was really on your radar, certainly at the start of the offseason.<\/p>\n

So, let’s just start there, that they kind of Established that this is, as far as you know, the Astros have been in the news plenty, They’ve made a lot of interesting transactions over the years since you’ve been covering them.<\/p>\n

It is fair to say that this is pretty up there as far as a, A surprising transaction?<\/p>\n

To be honest with you, And we’ll get into this more, like, they’ve just been so irrelevant in that market for so Long.<\/p>\n

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Like, look, they made the requisite An attempt to sign Shohei Ohtani.<\/p>\n

They put together a package for him.<\/p>\n

There’s a former Astros employee who still proudly tells me he’s got a Shohei Ohtani.<\/p>\n

Astros jersey in his closet, based off of the presentation that they made for Ohtani.<\/p>\n

They courted Masahiro Tanaka way back when.<\/p>\n

But again, that was before they were in this era.<\/p>\n

Before, they were really, really carrying high payrolls and were relevant.<\/p>\n

They’ve just been so absent in that market, that it never dawned on anyone to linked them to Tatsuya Imai, and it wasn’t just maybe the local beat.<\/p>\n

Like, I read a lot of national coverage.<\/p>\n

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I’m sure you guys talked about it here.<\/p>\n

And the Astros were never a team that you linked to Tatsuya Imai.<\/p>\n

But, you know, now given the benefit of hindsight, and now given what we know, Now, and really what Tatsuya Imai had said in November about how he didn’t necessarily want to play alongside other Japanese players.<\/p>\n

He wanted that challenge of facing all these Hurdles and obstacles that foreign players will face.<\/p>\n

He wanted that challenge of confronting them alone to see if he could handle it.<\/p>\n

And then he wanted to win.<\/p>\n

I think the Astros provide all of that.<\/p>\n

They’ve had very little Japanese presence here.<\/p>\n

They have no other Asian players on their team.<\/p>\n

So yes, he will be very alone in confronting a lot of these, Hurdles head-on.<\/p>\n

Close<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yahoo Sports senior MLB analyst Jordan Shusterman and The Athletic’s Astros Beat Writer Chandler Rome discuss Tatsuya Imai\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2389],"tags":[42,5,139,54,3211,4,468,4658],"class_list":{"0":"post-509119","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston-astros","8":"tag-astros","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-houston","11":"tag-houston-astros","12":"tag-houstonastros","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-shohei-ohtani","15":"tag-tatsuya-imai"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115851936618880085","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}