Shōta Imanaga Dominates Again After Making Fastball Location Adjustment

This is something we talked about more than once during spring training and then again after his debut, but it bears repeating after Shōta Imanaga dominated one of the most feared lineups in the game. He got 20 whiffs against a less robust Rockies roster during the home opener, relying on the fastball for five of them. Though he got just seven swings and misses over a rain-shortened outing on Sunday, six came on the four-seam.

The lefty struck out three and kept the Dodgers off the board with just two hits and no walks to keep his ERA at zero. That’s good, I think.

The Cubs have worked with Imanga to get comfortable throwing the heater higher in the zone, which would require a change from his time in Japan because umpires adjudicate it a little differently here. Some of them even call locations differently from pitch to pitch, but that’s another conversation entirely. While the belief was that it would take time for Imanaga to adjust, it appears as though he’s already figured things out.

Just look at these heatmaps from his first game and then both games combined.

Imanaga is living in the upper third of the zone and even got himself a little bit above it in Sunday’s win. That’s how someone with what FanGraphs says is a 40-grade fastball is in the 99th percentile for fastball run value. To be fair, that scouting score is more about Imanaga’s pedestrian 92.5 mph velocity than his elite ride from a lower-than-average release point. Hitters also have to be primed for the splitter, making the hard stuff play up.

Though he’s never going to be a fireballer and didn’t register a single pitch among the 57 hardest thrown on Sunday, Imanaga did top 94 mph twice. Wanna guess who saw those pitches and what happened? Both came in Imanaga’s first battle with Shohei Ohtani, with one at 94.1 mph getting fouled off and the hardest ball at 94.4 mph earning a big whiff for a strikeout that saw the slugger’s helmet tumble to the ground.

That at-bat featured two swings and misses with three fouls against six total four-seams, all of which were located in or above the upper arm-side quadrant of the zone. Just an absolute clinic by The Pitching Philosopher against a slugger who has intimidated some of the best hurlers in the game.

It’s still very early in the season and we saw last year how a Cy Young-caliber campaign can go off the rails in a hurry, but I’m on board with Shō > Stro. Many will argue that the rest of the league simply doesn’t have a book on him yet, though I’d counter that he isn’t some overnight success story out of nowhere and teams are well aware of his repertoire. What’s more, Imanaga has already proven capable of making adjustments to the MLB game and can surely continue to tweak as needed.

This dude is going to be a lot of fun to watch over the rest of the season and beyond.