Cubs have made a complicated decision with Shota Imanaga’s contract

As baseball season approaches, the Cubs have some questions to answer about what their 2026 roster will look like. Things like whether or not to extend a long-term contract offer for Kyle Tucker and whether or not to pursue starting pitcher Dylan Cease in free agency. The latter could come down to another decision the Cubs front office has to make this winter: whether to pick up Shota Imanaga’s contract option, which would keep him in Chicago for three more years, or let him walk in a Cubs uniform after just two seasons.

The first option would mean paying Imanaga an additional $57 million and keeping him in the rotation through the 2028 season on a contract with a no-trade clause. If they don’t go that route, things get a little more complicated. There is a scenario where Imanaga gets a one-year option for 2026, but that’s risky for him given his age, so it’s not likely he’ll take that option. There’s also a scenario where the Cubs decline the aforementioned three-year option and offer him a qualifying offer of likely one year and around $22 million, also probably not something Imanaga would be inclined to accept.

Not long ago, it might have seemed like an easy choice to keep Imanaga in Chicago for three more seasons. But his struggles during the 2025 regular season and in the playoffs may have muddied those waters a bit.

“When we signed Shota, if you would have shown us his production over the last two years, you would have picked that up right away,” said Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer. told reporters at the end-of-season press conference. “So not only has he produced for us, but he’s just a great teammate, a great asset to the organization.”

While Imanaga’s overall numbers look good, there was a troubling tendency to give up home runs late in the season, especially in September. Imanaga has allowed 20 home runs and posted a 5.17 ERA over his last 12 games. That tendency made it difficult for Cubs manager Craig Counsell to rely on Imanaga during the playoffs and contributed to their failure to get past the Brewers in the NLDS. He gave up two home runs in his Game Two start of the division series, one that proved to be a crucial loss for the Cubs.

But it’s possible that this small number of starts won’t influence Hoyer’s decision. Under different circumstances, it’s just a pitcher struggling over the course of about four weeks, and an experienced pitcher like Imanaga can usually be relied on to make adjustments and bounce back. Maybe it’s just the timing of this bad start that makes it seem like picking up Imanaga’s three-year option isn’t that obvious.

This would add significantly to the Cubs’ payroll for next year, and that could impact their approach to players like Tucker and Cease, along with any other free agents they hope to lure. Spotrac’s 2026 wage projections the Cubs are well under the $244 million luxury tax threshold, so there is room to spend, but retaining Imanaga and Tucker would significantly jeopardize their payroll status.

“Obviously we have to make decisions and we have to have discussions, and over the next two or three weeks we will do that,” Hoyer told reporters. “But I only have positive things to say about Shota.”

Hoyer has a lot of decisions to make this season, of which Imanaga is just one. In many ways, 2025 was a very successful season for the Cubs. They improved with nine wins in the 2023 and 2024 seasons and reached the playoffs for the first time since 2020. They won a playoff game and a playoff series for the first time since 2017. Their win in the wild-card round over the Padres this year marked the first time the Cubs had won a postseason game or a postseason series since beating the Nationals in the division series and then winning one game in the championship series against the Dodgers for eight years. past.

That time difference represents the elimination of the expected competitive window the Cubs thought they had opened when they reached the NLCS in 2015 and won the World Series the following year. Although the Cubs returned to the NLCS in 2017, they won just one of the games in that series and had not had postseason success since. By 2021, they traded away almost every member of that championship core and moved on from the hopes of the 2016 team.

To Hoyer’s credit, since taking over for Theo Epstein as president of the organization, he has fairly quickly turned the ballclub into one that could get back to the playoffs and have some success. But the paradigm in Chicago and among the Cubs fanbase has changed over the past decade, and more is expected than just achieving that. This winter, Hoyer has a chance to move on from last season’s success, and deciding what to do with Imanaga will be a big part of that process.