Had things played out differently, Shota Imanaga could have been pitching Friday night in a Red Sox uniform.
After a successful eight-season run in Japan, the 30-year-old left-hander announced his intention to make the jump to MLB this past offseason. The Red Sox were among the teams that reached out, and club officials held a Zoom meeting with Imanaga in which they laid out their plan for how they could help maximize his talents.
He opted to sign a four-year, $53 million deal with the Chicago Cubs, and so far he’s been worth every penny.
Imanaga has been outstanding to start his big league career, and Friday night he dominated the Red Sox in a 7-1 Cubs win. He allowed one run over 6.1 innings while holding Boston to just five hits with one walk and seven strikeouts, and through five starts he’s 4-0 with a 0.98 ERA over 27.2 innings.
With Kutter Crawford on the mound for the Red Sox, Friday represented one of the most impressive pitching matchups on paper in recent MLB history. According to MLB Network, Crawford (0.66 ERA) vs. Imanaga (0.84) was the first matchup between two pitchers with an ERA under 1.00 and at least 20 innings pitched since April 17, 2005, when Atlanta’s Mike Hampton (0.82) faced off against Philadelphia’s Brett Myers (0.44).
The showdown may not have quite lived up to that lofty bill, but both pitchers certainly showed up.
Crawford pitched well, but the 28-year-old righty didn’t have his best stuff and battled through what wound up being a solid six-inning performance. He allowed four runs (three earned) on a season-high 10 hits, mostly a succession of weak singles sprayed all over the park. He also struck out four without walking anyone, and Friday also represented the third time in six starts he’s completed six innings.
“Stuff was down, but like I told him, if that’s the bad one, we’ll take it,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said afterwards. “He gave us a chance to win the game. Six innings, four runs, that’s not great but it’s good enough for us to at least come back.”
Imanaga, on the other hand, was fabulous. The lefty mowed down the first 10 Red Sox batters he faced, and after Tyler O’Neill broke up his perfect game bid with a solo home run to dead center in the bottom of the fourth, he buckled down and kept the Red Sox off the board the rest of the way.
Boston’s best chance to do some real damage came in the sixth when O’Neill and Connor Wong singled to put two men on, but Imanaga struck out Pablo Reyes to end the threat and roared with excitement as he stepped off the mound.
Nothing the Red Sox saw from Imanaga on Friday, or anything the Cubs have done with him since his arrival, came as any surprise.
“What they’re doing is pretty similar to the plan we had,” Cora said prior to the game. “It’s a good fastball, we were talking about it today, we have to be on time and on top of it to be successful. I know everyone was talking about (Yoshinobu) Yamamoto, but this guy is good, too.”
So how close did Imanaga come to signing with Boston, anyway? The lefty declined to get into the specifics of his free agency following his outing, but he confirmed that he spoke with the Red Sox and that the presentation largely focused on his pitch mix and how he could succeed in the big leagues.
Ultimately he gave Boston consideration but opted to sign with Chicago.
“Both teams, the Cubs and the Red Sox, they have a lot of tradition, a lot of history,” Imanaga said via interpreter Edwin Stanberry. “It was really me and talking to other guys around me, and I came to the decision.”
And did it ever cross his mind warming up that, had he chosen differently, Fenway Park could have been his home instead?
“That’s a hard question because I’m on the Cubs, and it’s not really a possibility,” he said.
The Cubs initially took the lead with two runs in the second on a pair of RBI singles, capitalized on a Reyes throwing error to score a third run on a Pete Crow-Armstrong sacrifice bunt in the fourth, and added a Michael Busch sacrifice fly in the fifth. Then in the seventh the Cubs broke the game open with three runs off left-hander Joely Rodriguez, including a Christopher Morel RBI single and a two-run pinch hit double by Patrick Wisdom that prompted huge cheers of “Let’s go Cubbies” from the sizable contingent of visiting fans.
One bright spot for Boston was the continued dominance of right-hander Zack Kelly, who pitched two scoreless innings of relief and has now thrown four straight scoreless since being called up from Triple-A Worcester on Wednesday.
With the loss Boston falls to 14-13, while Chicago improves to 17-9. Josh Winckowski (1-1, 4.20 ERA) is slated to start for the Red Sox on Saturday against Chicago’s Ben Brown (0-0, 3.72), and first pitch is scheduled for 4:10 p.m.
