Analyzing Tatsuya Imai's Unique Slider & Free Agency Outlook

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00:00I want to start with the slider, actually, because I know Peyton has this.

00:04Describe Tetsuya Imai's slider to me, and why can it be good when it's clumped with Dari Moretta and Hans Kraus?

00:12Because Dari Moretta and Hans Kraus were only Major League Baseball players because of their sliders.

00:17And so all of these guys, Robert Stevenson as well, if they didn't have these bizarre sliders, I don't think they were going to be successful.

00:25Maybe Stevenson a little bit, but definitely not Kraus and Moretta.

00:28They were throwing that pitch a ton and really turning in impressive results with it.

00:33It breaks to the arm side.

00:35It's a slider grip that breaks to the arm side, which is just, it kind of breaks the brain of hitters.

00:40And for whatever reason, that pitch shape, I had to go back multiple years and find very specific players, but has always performed well.

00:50If you averaged out Hans Kraus' wrong-way sliders, Dari Moretta's wrong-way sliders, Tyler Stevenson's wrong-way sliders,

00:56the average hitter was getting bludgeoned by them.

00:59Like, it was 30-plus percent chase rate, huge in-zone lift, low batting average.

01:04And now you have a guy in a mind who's, I think, better than all of them in terms of the whole arsenal,

01:09but that wrong-way slider might be as well.

01:11He also, like, sometimes it'll have a little bit more glove side break, and then it looks gross that way.

01:16Sometimes it'll break more just straight vertically.

01:17Other times it will have that arm side, almost gyro ball type of action to it.

01:22And I think that's part of what makes him so bizarre.

01:25You just know hitter is really used to seeing that, and it resulted in some very hideous swings in a league

01:30where there's not a lot of hideous swings.

01:32I think in NPB, guys would rather ground out on a dribbler than punch out, and that's the difference.

01:40And when you look at the history of zone whiff, almost every pitcher that has come over from NPB

01:45to Major League Baseball in the last decade has seen their in-zone whiff numbers actually increase.

01:50So I think he's going to be, Am I, is going to be rewarded for that with the slider.

01:53And then the interesting thing is the feedback I generally got on the fastball from people with teams is,

01:59eh, we're not sure it's going to perform.

02:00And that just led me to dive deeper and deeper and deeper into it.

02:04I think it's going to perform.

02:05I think it's a really low arm angle that he adjusted in the last year.

02:10So if you average out his five years in Japan, I don't think you really get the full story.

02:13He lowered his arm angle.

02:14His strike rate jumped.

02:16The performance of the fastball at the top of the zone jumped.

02:20And I think that's something that you look at the fastball.

02:22It kind of looks like Luis Castillo's.

02:24It kind of looks like Luis Ortiz.

02:25You start to look at all the different fastballs at that arm angle, at that vert.

02:29And they all end up performing pretty well.

02:32And he hasn't thrown up in the zone nearly as much as he should, because that's not something that's encouraged as much in NPB.

02:38He's going to pitch up in the zone more in Major League Baseball.

02:41That fastball, as I detailed in our piece, dominated in the top part of the zone.

02:45He just didn't throw up there as much as he should.

02:47And the other thing is, I don't know how much velocity he has in him.

02:50We have it up on the screen right now in terms of there might be more in there.

02:53He kind of sandbags it sometimes and throws 91, 92, 93-mile-an-hour fastballs.

02:58Then we've also seen him touch 99-100 with his 100th pitch of the game.

03:03So I do think stateside, he might be a little bit more incentivized to take up a bit more.

03:09And we could see that fastball average 96.

03:11And we have not seen a lot of fastballs at his release height of about five feet from that arm angle, averaging north of 95 miles per hour.

03:18That's why there's been some Joe Ryan comps and some other guys as well.

03:22It throws harder.

03:23So that's why I feel like even if it doesn't perform as well as a Joe Ryan fastball,

03:27it throws harder than most of these guys that have that five-foot arm release height.

03:31And that's why it's going to perform because you don't see that release height, that arm angle at that velocity very often.

03:38And I think that's going to be something that's different enough for Major League hitters.

03:42The biggest variable is change-up.

03:45He has a splitter.

03:45He has a more traditional change-up.

03:48I think he's going to find one of those or both.

03:52And that could be what really puts him over the top.

03:54But the fastball slider combination has me very confident that he can at least be a middle rotation starter.

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