TORONTO -- Tatsuya Imai wants to do what the Blue Jays just came so close to doing.
The 27-year-old Japanese star is coming to Major League Baseball, posted earlier this month by the Saitama Seibu Lions with a signing window that expires Jan. 2. Even with the Dodgers already so rich in starting pitching, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki have made it easy to draw a straight line between “star Japanese free agent” and Los Angeles.
Well, maybe not this time. Recently, Imai appeared on the show “Hodo Station” and spoke with Daisuke Matsuzaka ahead of his decision.
"Of course, I’d enjoy playing alongside Ohtani, Yamamoto and Sasaki," Imai told Matsuzaka, "but winning against a team like that and becoming a world champion would be the most valuable thing in my life. If anything, I'd rather take them down."
Enter the Blue Jays, who have long been interested in landing a Japanese star. This isn’t just about Ohtani and that failed pursuit from the 2023-24 offseason, either, it’s about a broader, organizational desire to establish the Blue Jays as a brand in Asia. It’s about baseball, yes, but it’s also about business, trying to find their own slice of Japan’s baseball culture, eyeballs and dollars included.
"If there were another Japanese player on the same team, I could just ask them about anything, right?" Imai continued. "But that’s actually not what I’m looking for. In a way, I want to experience that sense of survival. When I come face-to-face with cultural differences, I want to see how I can overcome them on my own -- that’s part of what I’m excited about.”
It’s a fascinating look into the mind of Imai. At the core of this is still a young man leaving his home -- and his team of nine years -- to move to a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language. The cultural norms are different. The food is different. The cities are different. The game itself is different, so targeting a team with a fellow Japanese player would be completely understandable.
That’s clearly not a concern for Imai, though, another point in favor of the Blue Jays if they choose to pursue Imai more aggressively as his market unfolds over the next six weeks. The Blue Jays have no Japanese players on their current 40-man roster, their last being Yusei Kikuchi, who was signed in 2022 and traded to the Astros in ‘24.
Both Kikuchi and Korean lefty Hyun Jin Ryu commanded their own travelling press corps in their time with Toronto, Ryu’s often pushing well past a dozen reporters and cameras. Kikuchi, even on road trips, could have four, six or 10 reporters following his every move. The spotlight would shine even brighter on a pitcher of Imai’s talent, which is all part of what the Blue Jays are chasing. Wins. Whiffs. Strikeouts. Eyeballs.
On the mound, the 5-foot-11 Imai is no intimidating physical force, but his fastball reaches into the upper-90s with a slider, changeup and splitter. Last season in Japan, he posted a 1.92 ERA with 178 strikeouts over 163 2/3 innings. He won’t land a megadeal like Yamamoto’s (12 years, $325 million), but perhaps something in the range of Kevin Gausman’s five-year, $110 million deal is a better starting point for conversations, at least in terms of annual value.
The Blue Jays have major rotation questions beyond 2026, which is work they’ll need to get ahead of. The market offers Dylan Cease, Ranger Suárez, Framber Valdez, Michael King and others on top of trade candidates, but at 27, Imai is one of the few available pitchers entering his physical prime years.
The variable, of course, is how Imai will adapt to Major League hitters.
"In MLB, the average height for a hitter is higher than in Japan, so I focus on throwing a rising, high fastball from that low release -- almost like I’m driving it upward from below,” Imai told Matsuzaka. “I’m very conscious about not throwing downhill from over the top.”
From what little we know of Imai in North America so far, he’s taken an intriguing, impressive approach to this jump to MLB. He’ll need to land in the right situation to continue his development, but the Blue Jays offer so much of this at the highest levels, from their facilities to a coaching staff with a track record of taking solid starting pitchers and turning them up a notch.
The Blue Jays were, on a dozen different occasions, an inch away from beating the Dodgers. The entire baseball world saw it. Imai had to see it, too.