The Yankee rotation faces a little more downside than I think we’d all like. Gerrit Cole is 35 and coming off Tommy John surgery, Carlos Rodón will likely start the season on the IL alongside Cole, Luis
Gil never quite looked right coming off his own injury, and Will Warren was fine if unimpressive. That leaves Cam Schlittler, who was impressive but carries the same downside risk of every young starter, that is, pitching in the majors is very very hard.
There’s a couple options the Yankees can pursue to hedge that risk, but I kinda hate watching Dylan Cease pitch and even Bob Nutting isn’t dumb enough to trade Paul Skenes yet. Tatsuya Imai, recently posted by Seibu in NPB, offers about as much upside as Cease or fellow top FA starter Framber Valdez, but is younger and brings an opportunity for the Yankees to re-establish themselves as a prime destination for Asian talent.
A four-seam fastball that sits 95 and touches 99 and very good splitter give him two pitches that are already likely standouts at the MLB level, and he has a slider that looks MLB-ready but I do have some concerns about it’s usage in-zone. Still, that’s three pitches plus a changeup that showed promise in 2025, all in service of cutting his walk rate in half over the last three years.
What I really like about Imai’s delivery here is the whiplike motion of the arm while still driving straight to the plate. It’s not coming from quite as intense an angle as a Chris Sale, but it helps create a deceptive level of arm speed that I think means we could see harder offerings from Imai with the right development staff stateside.
The downside risk to Imai is twofold — workload and size. The first is a concern with any NPB starter, as Imai has topped out at 25 starts and 173 innings in 2024 — however, only 28 pitchers in baseball threw more than that in 2025, and it was virtually the same amount of usage that fellow countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto delivered for the Dodgers. Imai’s listed at just 154 pounds, very slight for a guy brushing six feet. He hasn’t had injury concerns in Japan, and averaged 6.8 innings per start in 2025, and while it may just be personal biases I’ll always prefer the starter with Cole’s body type or Schlittler’s.
There’s been a pretty clear throughline of Asian stars (or players that were supposed to be stars) from the late-90s until Masahiro Tanaka came around to shepherd in the Baby Bomber era. The Dodgers have seemingly become the go-to destination for posted talent, but the Cubs, Red Sox, Giants, and Padres have all made splashes on the international market since the Yankees did last. Re-establishing themselves as a destination for the world’s talent unlocks part of what makes an organization like the Dodgers a near-perpetual motion machine — when Clayton Kershaw gets old and Shohei Ohtani can’t pitch, you have Yamamoto and Rōki Sasaki in line. It’s time for the Yankees to get back to that as well.
