With agents and media and executives in Las Vegas for the GM Meetings, you’re bound to pick up some chatter.
For Jon Heyman, that chatter included expectations on several closer-call Qualifying Offer decisions, including Shota Imanaga: “Early word is that Shota Imanaga is expected to decline the $22M qualifying offer.”
Generally, teams don’t often make a Qualifying Offer in the first place if they believe the player is likely to accept. In Imanaga’s case, however, it was just never hard to imagine the price tag being juuuuust about the right fit for both sides. Since Imanaga’s situation was also made unique by the competing team and player options that necessarily had to precede the QO, and since Imanaga feels like he’s in that tier of player whose market could be dented by being attached to draft pick compensation, it has felt from the jump like Imanaga was a better bet to accept the QO than the average free agent.
But, hey, there’s the Jon Heyman report. A lot of this week, for Shota Imanaga’s camp, is about figuring out how his market would look if he did decline the offer. So it could well be the case that they are hearing good things, and thus the buzz is floating around that he will decline.
That said, it could also be the case that, in the process of trying to get a true and honest sense of what his market would look like, Imanaga’s camp is floating that he’s likely to reject the offer – that way, they can see whether they get more actively approached by potential suitors. You have to understand, there’s a whole lot of gamesmanship involved in these processes, with neither side wanting to reveal too much and lose future leverage. So it can be difficult to suss out precisely what would happen weeks or months into the future (even setting aside the usual reasons predicting the future is difficult).
Imanaga has until November 18 to decide on the offer. If he accepts, that’s his new deal with the Cubs, and they get him back for 2026. If he declines, then he and the Cubs can of course keep negotiating on a new deal. But if he signs elsewhere, he’ll cost his new team a little extra, and he’ll net the Cubs an extra draft pick after the second round.
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