Cubs left-hander Shota Imanaga is a free agent after the team declined its option to extend his contract to five years and $80 million, and he then declined a $15 million option for 2026, a source confirmed Tuesday.
Imanaga, 32, signed a four-year deal worth $53 million guaranteed with the Cubs in 2024, transitioning to Major League Baseball after a successful career in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball.
His contract had an intricate structure, giving the Cubs the option after both his second and third year to extend his deal to five years. Declining the option, however, would give Imanaga the opportunity to opt out.
The Cubs declined their option to extend Shota Imanaga’s contract to a total of 5 years and $80 million, and then Imanaga declined his $15 million option for 2026, @suntimes_sports confirmed. @JesseRogersESPN was on it first.
— Maddie Lee (@maddie_m_lee) November 4, 2025
That’s what happened this week. The Cubs still have the ability to extend a one-year qualifying offer ($22.025 million) to Imanaga in the coming days.
As soon as the Cubs decided not to make Imanaga part of their long-term plans, the left-hander’s next move was obvious.
He’d built a strong platform for free agency over his first two years in MLB. Imanaga was an All-Star in his rookie season. With a 2.91 ERA in 29 starts, he finished fifth in National League Cy Young voting and forth for NL Rookie of the Year.
This season, a hamstring injury interrupted his sophomore campaign and is believed to have contributed to some mechanical inconsistency down the stretch and into the playoffs. But Imanaga, the team’s Opening Day starter in the Tokyo Series, still had flashes of dominance post-injury and compiled a 3.73 ERA over the course of the season.
The Cubs laid out an offseason plan for him to attack some of the lower-body issues they identified in his delivery late in the year, and he was ready to apply them.
“When we signed Shota, if he’d shown us his production over the last two years, we would have taken that in a heartbeat,” Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said in his end-of-season news conference last month. “Not only has he produced for us, but he’s a great teammate, a terrific asset to the organization. Obviously, we have decisions to make, and we’ll have discussions, and over the next two or three weeks, we’ll do that. But I’ve got nothing but positive things to say about Shota.”
The Cubs already were in need of starting pitching depth this offseason. Unless the Cubs extend a qualifying offer and Imanaga accepts, losing him in free agency would exacerbate that demand.
The 2024 draft pick is recovering after breaking his right hand with Class A Myrtle Beach
Was Oct. 26, 2005, just a dream? It seems like it sometimes, though a long dig through the Sun-Times’ archives suggests a clinching victory in Houston actually happened.
