The Short Porch is looking at Shōta’s spring starts

Spring Training is well underway and the World Baseball Classic pool play has also begun. It’s always a good idea to exercise some caution with early stats because players are frequently working through a few things as they prepare for the regular season. That said, there are early indicators we do keep an eye out for, especially for pitchers, like velocity and new pitches. With the obvious small (and early!) sample size caveats in mind, let’s take a closer look at what the Cubs have seen from Shōta Imanaga two starts into Spring Training.

Cubs fans will recall that the 2025 season ended with Imanaga struggling with pitch location and giving up a large number of home runs as a result. To put that in perspective, you can see some of Shōta’s key stats split by season and month below:

Admittedly, some of these samples are minuscule. The 10.2 innings Imanaga threw between May and June last season while dealing with injury are too small to be meaningful. But there are trends here that are notable. Imanaga’s strikeout rate has declined during his time in MLB. His walk rate is still elite. Say what you will about Imanaga, he throws strikes. Unfortunately, the other thing you can see is that those strikes have been more hittable over time, which is a problem.

During his first two spring training starts there is both good and bad news out of Mesa for Imanaga. The good news is that the velocity on Shōta’s pitches has been up a couple of ticks for both starts. In 2025 Shōta’s fourseam averaged 90.8 miles per hour, his splitter was at 83.0 and his sweeper was 80.3. On February 24, Shōta’s fastball sat around 92 miles per hour and hit 94.1, hist splitter mostly sat at 84 and hit 85.5. He threw one sweeper, it was 82.6 miles per hour. This approximately two mile per hour bump persisted in his second start against the White Sox on March 1 — unfortunately, another problem that reared its ugly head during the 2025 season was on display during the March start: a highly elevated home run rate. Of the four hits Imanaga surrendered in that start against the White Sox, three went over the wall.

Obviously it’s early. Imanaga has only thrown 4.2 innings so far this spring, which is an even smaller sample than either of the tiny months I told you to ignore in the table above. His HR/FB rate will not be 37.5 percent for the spring and unless there is a small sample during a month in the regular season, he won’t post a split like that in the regular season. Pitchers are frequently working on their pitch arsenal and approach during the spring in ways that can radically shift their results from start to start. However, if Shōta is still missing middle-middle when Opening Day rolls around an extra two miles per hour might not be enough to get him back to his 2024 results.