Tatsuya Imai and Dana Brown: the Dragon and the Fox

To the untrained eye, the 2025 Houston headline reads “Astros fail to make playoffs for first time in 10 years”. There’s some murmurs that Bregman and Tucker’s departures spell the end of the golden age. Arm chair analysts do the Jack-Nicholson-nod.gif, pattern matching the concept of “what goes up must come down” over the Astros’ dominant run in crocodile tweeted epitaphs. They’re not incorrect because the Astros got Tatsuya Imai on New Year’s Day, nor is Tatsuya Imai’s acquisition the fluke that some think it is – a lucky, mid-market swindle Imai choked down for the opt outs. What’s going on here is big, and it takes a real Astros fan to pull it apart, one thread at a time. There’s something afoot, and it starts with the genius of Dana Brown. Apologies for the clanker-made cover photo. I’ll just say: justifiable use-case. 

Dana’s Task: Sunk Costs, Free Agents and the Most Injuries Ever

After Houston’s 2022 World Series victory, Dana Brown got the GM job over Brad Ausmus and Jeff Bagwell because he’s a scout (VP of scouting in Atlanta). 7 straight ALCS’s and lost draft picks take a toll on a farm system – mortgaging a little youth here and there to scoop deadline adrenaline so the party keeps going — and Dana didn’t even get a clean slate. In 2023, he joined mid-way through spring training, inheriting a bad José Abreu contract worth 3 years / $60 million. For newcomers, it took Abreu 260 at-bats to hit his first home run as an Astro. In 2024-25, Dana’s roster was decimated by injuries. He had $17 and $14 million AAV on the books for Lance McCullers Jr. and Ryan Pressly respectively, where the former was injured indefinitely and the latter was almost washed out. Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman were soon-to-be Free Agents and Framber Valdez after that. 

Jake Meyers, Astros CF leaves the game with an injury - https://www.chron.com/sports/astros/article/houston-astros-suffered-most-from-injuries-2025-21055439.php 

In 2025, it was far worse than pundits realized. The Astros led the major leagues with a potential WAR loss of 17.6. They missed the playoffs by a tie-breaker half game. By the All-Star break, their MLB team was the Corpus Christi Hooks and Sugarland Space Cowboys, where Zach Short started 22 games at shortstop and Colton Gordon was your most reliable arm after Hunter Brown. All All-Stars were injured for most of the season (Jeremy Peña, Yordan Alvarez, Isaac Paredes). They were down 7 starters: Hayden Wesneski, Ronel Blanco, Spencer Arrighetti, Cristian Javier, Lance McCullers Jr. and J.P. France. They lost All-Star closer Josh Hader towards the end of the year. Once Yordan made his big return, he sprained his ankle in a freak accident tapping home plate and missed the rest of the year. Find a better picture for Houston’s past season: challenge impossible.

Man With a Plan

Yet, Dana made turbo lemonade, always. In 2023, he hammed up prospect Drew Gilbert as untouchable, then flipped him for a Verlander reunion tour at the deadline to get one win away from another World Series. In 2024, he hand-picked Yusei Kikuchu to enter the Astros’ car wash for the best games pitched in his career (find “HOU” below).

Yusei Kikuchi Standard Pitching, Baseball Reference - https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kikucyu01.shtml 

Last season, he sent a Kyle Tucker rental to the Cubs for 14 years of team control in Isaac Paredes, Cam Smith, and Houston-native arm, Hayden Wesneski. Dana clocked Paredes to feast on the Crawford Boxes and he did, becoming an All-Star and hitting more home runs than his past year in Tampa/Chicago despite having 200 fewer at-bats. He clocked Cam (14th overall pick in 2024) as a rightfielder, despite having only ever played third base. Smith made the team in camp and was a runner-up, rightfield Gold Glove winner in 2025. Then, for his master stroke, he reacquired Carlos Correa at the deadline and made the Twins pay for it, making Minnesota eat $33 million of the $100 million remaining on his contract. Scout’s eye meets The Prince. 

2026: An Impossible Problem

Dana entered this year’s Hot Stove with real problems to solve. He’s got one pitcher and three question marks while facing a TJ-made-scarce market with no prospects to deal, as well as marching orders to both win big but not spend over the luxury tax. Scylla and Charybdis look fun.

• No Spend: His roster’s payroll was $22.2 million under the CBT, thanks to his deft salary dumps of Ryan Pressly (2025) and Mauricio Dubón, while finally being free of the Abreu contract. Yet, he had strict orders from his boss, Jim Crane, to not exceed the CBT threshold. Crane has also noted that the championship window is “always open” as long as he’s the owner. Dana has to win big with mid-market constraints. 

• No Pitching: Arrighetti might be healthy for opening day, but Cristian Javier hasn’t looked like his combined no-hitter self of 2022. Who is your number four starter if those two pan out? Those are the three question marks for the rotation. Your one sure thing, Hunter Brown, tailed off at the end of last year from a career high in innings pitched (185), and workhorse Framber wasn’t coming back from free agency, especially after his “cross-up” with César Salazar. 

• No Prospects: Aside from Dana’s first first-round pick as GM, Brice Matthews, the farm is more like a dust bowl. Matthews is out of Nebraska, and he’s been knocking on the door of the big leagues, already, having shown some heroics and flash with both the bat and the leather. Up his sleeve, Dana’s got an extra first-round PPI pick from Hunter Brown finishing top 3 in AL Cy Young voting last year, in addition to the 17th overall pick in the 2026 draft. His top prospect to start the Hot Stove is Jacob Melton, a K-happy, defensive-only outfielder from Oregon. After that, it’s pretty thin, so he doesn’t have chips to play with.

Tatsuya Imai pitching with the Seibu Lions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsuya_Imai 

Imai-zing Grace

Getting Tatsuya Imai gives Dana Brown an innings eater and a firm number two starter. Scott Boras compared Tatsuya to Yamamoto, though skeptics say he’s closer to a Kodai Senga. Before we get there, here’s what Dana calculated, and note each bullet is respective to the impossible problem it solves:

• Imai’s $18 million AAV contract keeps the Astros under the CBT luxury tax. Since he is a posted player, and not a free agent, the Astros are not penalized any draft picks gained from letting Framber walk to free agency. 

• If Imai is Yamamoto, you get him with Hunter Brown for a year and a healthy lineup of Yordan, Paredes, Correa, Peña, Walker, Altuve, Meyers (coming off a career year), and Yainer Diaz, with healthy Bryan Abreu and Josh Hader to lock down the end game. If he’s not, you took an inexpensive flyer and mitigated the cost. 

• Imai is the third pitcher Dana’s acquired in two months. He got Ryan Weiss from the KBO and Imai from NPB – no prospects lost. He got Mike Burrows from Pittsburgh for Jacob Melton. Here’s the rub: armchair analysts blasted Brown for getting fleeced. They only saw Melton’s relative ranking in the Astros system. Melton struckout in 29 of 70 at-bats in the bigs, and struggled to make good contact. Ask any Astros fan: Melton looked overmatched, despite playing a decent centerfield. Brown pulled his same tactic of hamming up a prospect and then flipping them for real value (six years of control of Mike Burrows in a pitcher-scarce trade market). 

Based on the above, we have to assume that Dana Brown knows what he is doing. He is concurrently juggling long-term, short-term, and practical threads of execution. He is able to practically fill gaps like Kikuchi (‘24) and Correa (‘25) at the trade deadline, shrewdly manufacture long-term flexibility (replacing Dubon’s utility gold glove and $6 million salary with Nick Allens’ shortstop gold glove runner-up and $850K plus 4 years of team control), and effectively deliver on short-term, Hot Stove missions like get pitching for 2026 Opening Day.

Imai didn’t fall into his lap as a Kodai Senga-lite comp that nobody wanted. Imai’s floor is a number 3 or 4 starter, sure, but there’s some threads here we need to bind up our story.

Imai’s Got an X Factor

Dana keeps talking about how Imai is a “competitor”. When Imai was asked about playing in a more Japanese-cultured team or media market, he replied, “that’s actually not what I’m looking for. In a way, I want to experience that sense of survival”. He’s that rare red pill whose motive isn’t so much money or stats – it’s the experience of being on stage for all of eternity to see. He’s not the stoic samurai just looking for honor in victory, either. He’s got the rockstar attitude, as well: he mocked Trevor Bauer’s sword celebration when pitching against him in NPB. He was suspended for smoking in his Seibu Lions Jersey when he was 18. He didn’t even want to pitch in the MLB. He’s only doing it because he’s bored with Japanese hitters trying to tire him out with their death by a thousand cuts approach. He wants faster bat speeds trying to hit bombs. One of his major criticisms is that the whiff rate in NPB is higher because hitters bail out (to induce any contact, tire out pitchers faster) more than they’re patiently awaiting a meatball, so him as a K-guy conventionally calls into question how that’ll translate to more patient hitters in the MLB. To me, that he is intentionally seeking out more patient barrels flips the table on that calculus. 

He’s exciting to watch, not timid. He studies his craft like Shota Imanaga but has the playoff panache of Carlos Correa. The Astros stand at the verge of the postseason – separated only by injury and another good arm. And that’s where we meet Imai, not as a Dodgers-destroyer, per se, but as a man on a mission to dance with the biggest dragon.

Imai wants to Win in Houston

Imai’s motive is in the object of the preposition, not the gerund. The former Seibu Lion chose Houston. Like an anime swordsman in a story arc, he knows the mythos of the MLB. As far as rivalries go, Red Sox vs. Yankees was over in 2004. Let the volume of the boos inform you: it’s Astros and Dodgers now. Imai is well aware that in order to become a legend back home, the best way is to defeat LA as an Astro. By now, we all know the quote from his appearance on the Hodo Station show with Daisuke Matsuzaka:

"Of course, I’d enjoy playing alongside Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Sasaki … but winning against a team like that and becoming a world champion would be the most valuable thing in my life. If anything, I'd rather take them down."

Note this article’s clanker-made image – Imai’s specifically ready for Houston. His rockstar attitude sees the Astros as an ember that he can breathe life into. He’s exciting to watch, not timid. He studies his craft like Shota Imanaga but has the playoff panache of Carlos Correa. The Astros stand at the verge of the postseason – separated only by injury and another good arm. And that’s where we meet Imai, not as a Dodgers-destroyer, per se, but as a man on a mission to dance with the biggest dragon. His quote about survival, coupled with his championship ambitions as “the most valuable thing in my life”, are a two-part epoxy that reinforce each other, and ennoble his hype from being merely a braggadocious new signing into a hero’s quest.

He’s Not just Good, He’s Getting Good

Baseball America grades Imai a 60 slider and a 55 fastball, where the slider ‘gyros’ by running arm side (into right-handed hitters). That’s weird to hit. He also profiles with a lower, whippy, deceptive release. So his slider has that unicorn style that Cristian Javier’s ‘invisiball’ 4-seam had in 2022, but his style looks a lot like Spencer Arrighetti. Scott Boras said he’s the next Yamamoto, but that’s an agent talking.

We need to look at Imai’s trend. From 2022 to 2025 he halved his walk rate (14% down to 7%) and increased his fastball velocity in addition to his innings workload (>160). 2022-2024 he posted an ERA under 2.50 and last year dropped it to a 1.92 with a 2.01 FIP. Look at the below comp to Yamamoto. Not nearly as elite, but note the trend. Compare their last year in the NPB: Imai had 178 strikeouts to Yamamoto’s 169, pitching 163 to Yamamoto’s 164 innings, with a 1.92 ERA to Yamamoto’s 1.21. That’s comparable. Moreover, he’s been developing in that direction with tweaks to his form and pitch mix, so it’s not the arrow in flight, it’s where it’s headed.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto - https://npb.jp/bis/eng/players/53355134.html 

Tatsuya Imai - https://npb.jp/bis/eng/players/31335134.html 

When Kodai Senga came over he was 30 years old (Imai will be 27). His last year in the NPB was a 1.94 ERA with 156K over 144 innings pitched. Imai profiles better with both upside, numbers, and youth.

The Astros Carwash

It came out that the club has been specifically monitoring Tatsuya Imai since his high school days, choosing to keep their cards close to their chest. For the past decade, the Astros have had one of the best pitching and pitch-scouting pipelines in baseball. This is colloquially the Astros carwash: they take Ronel Blanco and help him to throw a no-hitter, in retrospect they make it look like they fleeced the Pirates for Gerrit Cole, they find Bryan Abreu, Cristian Javier, and Framber Valdez as international signees and make them October legends. It’s how they took Hunter Brown out of Wayne State, gave him a 2-seam and years of analytics and helped him toward 3rd place for the AL Cy Young award in 2025. 

The Astros may lack a Japanese market (though they did just sign a 15 year name deal with Japanese HVAC company Daikin Industries), but they did bring in Yusei Kikuchi last year with the same car wash approach. Dana targeted him for those tinkering purposes. They tweaked Kikuchi to throw a changeup and how to pitch mix, situationally. In his Astros debut, he struck out 8 in a row. His career numbers from his months in Houston shine on his baseball reference page. Imagine what they can do with Imai, who already shows a penchant for constant improvement in the prime of his career.

Dana Brown, Astros GM - https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6227940/2025/03/25/astros-gm-dana-brown-straight-shooter/ 

Imai has a big upside but I think his main calling card is that he eats innings. This is the crux of Dana’s genius. He underspent the hype. While everyone was debating ‘is he Yamamoto or not’, Dana executed a game plan. He got innings to replace Framber, no matter if they come with a 4.50 ERA. Imai didn’t cost Dana’s rebuild any draft picks, prospects, or a CBT penalty, and the year / cost risk is minimal. If Imai is just a 4th starter, you took some weight off your bullpen giving guys like Wesneski and Ronel Blanco time to come back from TJ in July. And you’re not locked in for the 5-8 year projections Imai initially had. You’ve used the bully pulpit to exchange weaker prospects (Melton) for controllable value to fill out your rotation with Mike Burrows. Mostly, you brought excitement to a fanbase that stands at the boundary between rebuild and glory. What a winter.

Chandler Rome wrote last spring about how Dana’s ethos is authenticity, and how it can be a weakness for him he’s looking to curb. He posits that Brown is trying to move from being a straight-shooter scout to a poker face – implying that Brown’s gushings about signing Tucker and Drew Gilbert being an ‘untouchable’ prospect are not in fact self-conscious. However, I think Dana Brown knows what he is doing. I think his style is rope-a-dope. He plays a mumbling pencil-pusher with a wistful, ‘lights are on but nobody’s home’ stare, all the while running the war room board in three temporal threads. It may not be the hyperbolic 3D chess that I colloquially ascribe to good leadership, but it’s effective enough for baseball, and in keeping the Astros window dynamic, if not dynastic. Houston holds its breath: it stands on the precipice of a great battle to stay gold. Will Imai and Dana prevail?