Tatsuya Imai Says He Prefers ‘Survival Vibe’ of Team Sans Japanese Players

Japanese righty Tatsuya Imai was officially posted on November 19 and is one of the top free agents on the market, ranking right up there with Dylan Cease and Framber Valdez when it comes to coveted pitchers. He won’t turn 28 until May and boasts a mid-90s fastball that can touch triple digits, plus he’s got a wrong-way slider that helped him generate a 27.8% strikeout rate in NPB this past season. He could earn a contract of $150 million or more, so most predictions have him landing in a major market.

However, Imai’s comments during a recent television interview seem to indicate that he’s looking for something a little different. As in, a place that doesn’t already have Japanese players. That used to be a more commonly-held sentiment among players coming over from NPB, a function of the culture’s prioritization of respect and personal space. The advent of international professional play and the continued success of Japanese players in MLB has softened that stance a great deal, perhaps even reversing it.

“(If there were Japanese people) they’d just tell you anything if you asked, right?” Imai said, according to a translation via X. “I don’t really want that; in a way, I want to experience that survival vibe, you know, and when facing cultural differences, making how I overcome them on my own one of the fun parts.”

We probably need to take this with a grain of salt, as it sounds very similar to what was coming out of Roki Sasaki‘s camp before he eventually signed with the Dodgers.

“I think that there’s an argument to be made that a smaller, mid-market team might be more beneficial for him as a soft landing,” Joel Wolfe, Sasaki’s agent, told the media at last year’s Winter Meetings. “Rōki is somewhat quiet. He has a dry sense of humor. He’s very witty. He’s not verbose. He doesn’t necessarily love people that are verbose.”

It’s entirely possible that Imai would like to forge his own path, but I tend to think this is at least as much about creating more of a bidding frenzy by encouraging teams that might not otherwise be viewed as contenders for his services. That also means the usual suspects might try to jump the market, just like the Dodgers did when they threw $325 million at Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

The Cubs are believed to be among the favorites to sign Imai, but that will fade if his price tag rises much beyond the projections of around $150 million.