The Athletic connects Dodgers to NPB All-Star pitcher, but they don't need him

The Athletic linking the Los Angeles Dodgers to Tatsuya Imai barely even registers as surprising at this point, it’s practically a reflex. A high-end NPB arm gets posted, the Dodgers are floated, everyone nods along. That’s the cycle. But drop that familiar rumor into the 2025-26 context and it feels more like lazy connective tissue than legitimate need.

This is a club that didn’t just dip into the Japanese talent pool; they drained half of it. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki — all in Dodger blue. Add Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow to the pile of starting pitching, and you’re not projecting a normal rotation, you’re sketching out a super-rotation that already reads like a fantasy draft gone wrong in a competitive league. The idea that this specific version of the Dodgers has to chase another expensive import starter just to keep up sounds good in a headline, but falls apart under even light scrutiny.

Dodgers rumors around Tatsuya Imai miss the point of their already absurd rotation

And that’s before you factor in cost and opportunity. Imai is coming off a monster year for the Seibu Lions: 1.92 ERA in 24 starts, 163.2 innings, 178 strikeouts, legitimate workload, real swing-and-miss stuff, and a track record that’s stabilized over multiple seasons as he’s matured into a frontline presence in NPB. 

In a market desperate for reliable innings and upside without a qualifying-offer tax, that profile is going to pull heavy bids and likely land him in that “strong No. 2 / high-end No. 3” MLB projection range with a nine-figure total investment once you tack on the posting fee. That price point makes sense for teams actually trying to close a glaring rotation hole — the Yankees, Giants, maybe a desperate club that just watched its depth chart crumble. Not for a Dodgers team already drowning in premium arms and long-term commitments.

On paper, the Dodgers’ 2026 rotation borders on ridiculous — five arms with ace ceilings, October experience, or both. Even if you want to bake in the obvious caveats, like Glasnow’s history and Snell’s volatility, the general truth is that no pitching staff stays fully intact over 162. The baseline talent is so overwhelming that “need” stops being the right word.

Any Imai pursuit wouldn’t be about patching a leak; it would be about hoarding. And at some point, even the Dodgers have to acknowledge the diminishing returns of stacking another $25–30 million arm on top of an already top-heavy staff when there are bullpen layers to reinforce, future position-player salaries to plan around, and luxury-tax math that doesn’t just vanish because you lead the league in vibes.

That said, if you’re trying to reverse-engineer the logic behind The Athletic’s connect-the-dots exercise, there is a version where it tracks. If Glasnow’s body doesn’t cooperate, if one of the Japanese headliners hits an adjustment wall or suffers a setback, if the Dodgers decide they are fully committing to a “seven-deep or bust” rotation model that nukes variance before it starts, then Imai becomes less of a luxury and more of an insurance policy that fits their recent behavior pattern.

He’s durable by recent NPB standards, misses bats, competes in the zone, and comes without the qualifying-offer penalty that complicates similar arms on the domestic market. Viewed through that hyper-aggressive, zero-margin lens, you can squint and see the appeal: another reliable, peak-age arm who lengthens your postseason options and keeps you from ever having to pretend a Rule 5 flier is “next man up” in August.

But that justification says more about the league’s fear of the Dodgers than the Dodgers’ actual problem set. Right now, clubs like the Yankees, Giants and other rotation-needy contenders should be the ones treating Imai as a priority, not a trophy. They’re the teams for whom a stabilizing mid-rotation presence with upside changes the equation — bridging aging cores, covering injury-riddled staffs, or signaling that they’re actually serious about contending instead of hoping on back-end patchwork. For Los Angeles, chasing Imai would be a flex, not a fix. And if there’s any small mercy left for the rest of the sport, it’s this: for once, the big bad Dodgers can sit out an NPB bidding war without it costing them a thing.