Imanaga continues mound mastery over Phils in back-to-back starts

CHICAGO -- Shota Imanaga overpowered the Phillies in his previous start, piling up strikeouts and missing bats at a rapid rate. The Cubs' lefty was tasked with facing the same lineup on Tuesday night, but he quickly felt that his signature splitter was not operating as sharply as usual.

Imanaga was forced to adjust his plan, but the dominance remained the same.

“The sign of a really good pitcher,” manager Craig Counsell said after the Cubs ran their winning streak to seven in a row with a 7-4 victory over the Phillies at Wrigley Field. “It’s not easy facing that team again two starts in a row. He pitched really, really well.”

Imanaga gave the Cubs seven innings and limited the damage to one solo home run off the bat of slugger Kyle Schwarber. Without his splitter working as well as he hoped, Imanaga ended with only one strikeout. He leaned heavily on his fastball and induced weak contact all night long to continue his stellar start to the season.

Through five starts this season, Imanaga now has a 2.17 ERA with 32 strikeouts against six walks in 29 innings, in which he has allowed just 15 hits. Three of those are home runs, which account for five of the seven runs he has surrendered this year. In his last four turns since giving up four runs in his season debut, Imanaga has a 1.13 ERA.

“Look, he’s pitching at a really high level right now,” Counsell said. “But again, he has done this. He has pitched like this. So, this is not something he hasn’t done. So, it’s not above what he’s capable of. It’s sustainable.”

On Wednesday at Citizens Bank Park, Imanaga struck out 11 in six innings against the Phillies and tied a Cubs’ pitch-tracking era record with 26 whiffs (swinging strikes). He did so with a balanced attack on the mound, featuring his four-seamer 35% of the time and his signature splitter at a 33% rate.

In this subsequent matchup, Imanaga upped his fastball rate to 51% (44 of his 87 pitches) and trimmed the splitter use to 28%. He also threw fewer sweepers (20% on Wednesday vs. 11% on Tuesday), opting for an aggressive style.

That was partially out of necessity, but Cubs catcher Carson Kelly also saw that the move to more fastballs was working.

“You go in with a game plan, but then also the hitters will dictate kind of what to do,” Kelly said. “Also, you still need to throw the pitch. Even if he doesn’t have it, it’s his splitter. He needs the pitch, right? And if he doesn’t have it, you find spots to use it where you might not give up damage. But his heater was really good today.

“He was trusting it. He was locating it really well and the hitters were telling us to keep throwing it. With the way they were taking it, the swings that we were getting on them, it kind of dictated what the rest of the game plan was going to be.”

Kelly pointed to a moment in the seventh, when Imanaga generated a groundout off the bat of J.T. Realmuto with a sinker.

“Being able to do that,” Kelly said, “is a sign of like, ‘He’s in a good spot and having the confidence to execute different pitches.’”

Imanaga did issue one walk and scattered three hits, but no baserunners (beyond Schwarber’s sixth-inning blast) reached further than second.

“The control was a little bit off tonight,” Imanaga said via interpreter Edwin Stanberry. “But I was able to throw it in locations where they couldn’t do that much damage. ... Carson came up with a game plan and he was calling a great game.”

The Cubs had a surplus of baserunners against Phillies lefty Jesús Luzardo in the first five innings, but did not break through until the fifth. Moisés Ballesteros came off the bench and drew a pinch-hit, bases-loaded walk against reliever Orion Kerkering to get Chicago on the board and put a run on Luzardo’s line.

The North Siders’ offense started rolling from there. In the sixth, Michael Busch came through with a two-run single with the bases loaded to put the Cubs ahead, 3-1. In the seventh, Nico Hoerner (solo shot) and Seiya Suzuki (two-run homer) each went deep off reliever Tim Mayza to increase the cushion.

That late push was sufficient in supporting another great start from Imanaga.

“Even if he didn’t have his best stuff, it didn’t look like it,” Suzuki said via Stanberry. “That was reassuring. When he’s pitching like that and getting outs, the thought is, ‘We want to score runs and give him some breathing room.’ We were able to do that.”