MLB Daily Notes - April 16
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis
The Daily Notes are the flagship resource of MLB Data Warehouse. Every morning, Jon breaks down the current goings on in the fantasy baseball world, and an automated daily report gets you up to date on key stats and trends. Become a paid subscriber at MLB Data Warehouse to get this unlocked in your inbox every morning!
Good morning! Especially to those of you who have Shota Imanaga on your fantasy teams.
Shota’s K% was under 21% last year. This year it’s kicked up to 38%. He had a 13.2% SwStr% last year; this year, it’s 18%.
His Stuff+ is up, here are those 2025 to 2026 comparisons:
FF: 101.5 → 105.9
FS: 99.6 → 102.2 (splitter)
ST: 104.3 → 105.3 (sweeper)
Say what you will about Stuff+, it’s certainly not a bad thing to see massive increases on all of your pitches like this.
The pitch mix:
The fastball is landing for strikes and he’s racking up whiffs and punch-outs with the splitter and sweeper.
The one thing to mention, as always with Imanaga, is the fly ball rate. A 24% GB% is laughably low. The guy has the second-lowest GB% among starters in the league, only Max Scherzer is lower.
That means that he’ll give up homers. Probably a lot of them. If we believed he was going to keep a 35% K%, then it wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not going to happen. He’ll probably come back down to 26% or so for the rest of the year.
Once the weather become more hitter-friendly, things will get worse for these fly ball pitchers.
→ 2025 HR/FB: 15.6%
→ 2026 HR/FB: 14.1%
You could try to sell high on Imanaga for that reason, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to do it. He’s a legitimately nastier pitcher this year, and that matters quite a bit.
Let’s look at some other pitchers who are giving up a lot of fly balls without giving up a lot of home runs. Here’s everybody with a FB% above 27% and a HR/FB below 10%:
That’s 29 fly balls for Bryan Woo without a homer. And 16 for Joe Ryan, and 17 for Reid Detmers! Beware the long ball in those cases.
Shohei Ohtani was second on the day with 22 whiffs (Imanaga had twnety-six, by the way SHEESH!)
→ 6.0IP 2H 1ER 1R 10K 2BB
He was eased back into the rotation last year, taking until late August to be fully built up. Since then (not including playoffs):
→ 37.2 IP, 0.48 ERA, 0.72 WHIP, 32% K%, 7.1% BB%, 0.24 HR/9
Silliness!
The third guy to rack up 20 whiffs last night was Spencer Arrighetti. It was a matchup with the road Rockies, but dang!
→ 6.0IP 2H 1ER 1R 10K 4BB
→ 20% SwStr%, 50% Strike%, 39% Ball%
There’s bad news with the four walks and the 39% Ball%.
He threw a bunch of curveballs, and very slow ones at that at 76mph. His second favorite pitch was the sweeper at 79.
The four-seamer was thrown 16 times with just one whiff and a horrible 56% Ball%. So the curveball really saved his day. I’m not sure if that’s a sustainable approach. But it’s one start. We’ll have to wait and see.
Arrighetti’s MLB career now:
→ 36 GS, 186 IP, 4.88 ERA, 1.40 WHIP, 26% K%, 11% BB%, 1.3 HR/9
There’s always been a walk problem. And pairing that with a probably bad fastball seems very risky. I wouldn’t be too excited about Arrighetti, but it’s also not very easy to get 20 whiffs in any given situation.