Hikikomori is the Japanese term that describes extreme social isolation to the point where young workers will take their meal break on the toilet. When it comes to signing star players from Japan, the San Francisco Giants have not sought to isolate themselves. Yet they have been denied a seat at the table all the same.
The Japanese market has stymied the Giants’ every overture while becoming a pipeline for the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose revenue-driving stars were the 2025 Most Valuable Player Award winners in the National League (Shohei Ohtani) and World Series (Yoshinobu Yamamoto).
So Tatsuya Imai, the right-handed Seibu Lions ace who might have the highest ceiling of any free-agent starting pitcher this offseason, would appear to be a perfect fit — maybe not to close the chasm between the Giants and their World Series-champion archrivals on his own, but to imbue their fans with the hope that San Francisco might be starting to establish itself as an international destination. The Imai-to-San Francisco coals were already glowing on the rumor circuit before the 27-year-old pitcher (perhaps strategically) brought the billows to a podcast interview last week and declared his preference to beat the Dodgers rather than join them.
Except the Giants are choosing to sit this one out.
According to club sources, because of a number of financial considerations, the Giants do not anticipate making the nine-figure investment required to sign Imai — or any of the other top pitchers on the free-agent market. Instead, the club is focusing on more modestly priced alternatives. They expect to sign at least one starting pitcher and they plan to add to their bullpen beyond the $1.4 million agreement in place with left-handed reliever Sam Hentges. But after splurging on $182-million shortstop Willy Adames last offseason and taking on more than $250 million while trading for corner infielder Rafael Devers in June, their current preference is to limit their spending to short-term deals.
Tatsuya Imai recently expressed an interest in competing against the Dodgers. (Gene Wang / Getty Images)
Earlier this month at the GM Meetings in Las Vegas, Giants president Buster Posey, GM Zack Minasian and newly hired manager Tony Vitello met face-to-face with Imai’s agent, Scott Boras. They requested medical reports on Imai as well as fellow Boras Corp. clients Ranger Suárez, Max Scherzer and Dylan Cease, the latter of whom just signed a seven-year, $210 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays.
But sources say the Giants were never prepared to enter the bidding anywhere near what Cease received from the defending American League champions.
From a baseball perspective, it’s a curious posture. There’s no question that Imai would address the team’s most pressing roster need. And the Giants are seemingly motivated to continue making aggressive improvements, having just fired a manager, Bob Melvin, for finishing two games under .500 over the previous two seasons.
The Giants would appear to have money to spend, too — at least as far as the luxury tax is concerned. The Giants could lavish $60 million on the 2026 roster and still reside comfortably beneath the initial tax threshold of $244 million.
Yet the balance sheet forecasts for 2026, at least the bits of it that can be ascertained, tell a different story. The Giants’ cash-basis payroll commitments for next year include $17 million in deferred signing bonus money owed on Jan. 15 to left-hander Blake Snell, who went on the injured list twice and contributed 20 starts for the Giants in 2024 before opting out of the remainder of his two-year, $62 million contract and signing with the Dodgers last offseason. Although salaries for coaches and front-office staff are not included in luxury tax calculations, money out the door is still money out the door. When you add up the $4 million guaranteed to Melvin, plus the $3 million buyout in Vitello’s contract with the University of Tennessee, the Giants will spend $10.5 million on the manager position next season.
While it’s impossible to pencil out a franchise’s baseball operations spending in a given year, once the Snell deferral and managerial overruns are folded in, it’s fair to assume that the Giants are already nearer to last year’s baseball ops expenditures than it might otherwise appear.
The Giants owe Blake Snell deferred money payments of $17 million in January 2026 and $15 million in July 2027. (Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
Of course, none of this matters to fans who would point out that the Giants’ franchise value has soared 3,900 percent to an estimated $4 billion from its $100 million purchase price in 1992, or who are upset that the Giants haven’t fielded a top-five payroll since 2019. But private equity tends to take a different view, and the Giants sold 10 percent of the team to Sixth Street Partners in March. While announcing the transaction, the Giants said the organization would use the cash to fund stadium upgrades and other facilities, including the Mission Rock development in which the Giants are partners in restaurants and other ventures.
Private equity investors are walled off from making cash-flow decisions, according to comments that Chicago Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts made to The Athletic in January. But the Giants might be concerned that taking substantial operational losses on paper would fail to demonstrate responsible corporate governance so soon after entering their partnership with Sixth Street. And that’s a particular concern when the revenue-generating picture is far from clear.
It’s a healthy sign that the Giants have grown attendance from 2.5 million in 2023 to 2.647 million in ’24 and then to 2.925 million this past season, for a gain of 5,255 fans per game over the three-season span. But club sources say many of those excess tickets were discounted.
Additionally, any revenue growth at the gate has been mitigated to some extent by the uncertain television landscape. Although the Giants’ television contract with NBC Sports Bay Area doesn’t expire until 2032, making them one of the most stable franchises in a world where regional sports networks are crumbling around them, the Giants negotiated a substantial part of their rights fee as a 30-percent ownership stake in NBCSBA in which they receive a share of the network’s revenues. And NBCSBA is like every other struggling RSN, trying to offset subscriber losses with higher carriage fees. This past January, many Comcast Xfinity customers lost access to NBCSBA and NBC Sports California when the channels shifted from the cable company’s Popular TV package to the more expensive Ultimate TV tier, at a premium of nearly $50 per month. In March, NBC Universal made NBCSBA available as an a la carte streaming option to Peacock subscribers for an additional monthly fee of $17.95.
The much more succinct counterpoint: Many of the teams supporting higher payrolls are dealing with the same uncertainties.
The Giants did their homework on Imai and scouted him thoroughly this past season, when he finished 10-5 with a 1.92 ERA for Seibu. But the Giants knew that Imai and most of the other top free-agent rotation roads would lead through Boras.
It’s notable that Posey hasn’t signed a Boras client since he ascended to the top chair in October of last year, shortly after he appeared to circumvent the super-agent while helping to expedite the completion of a six-year, $151 million extension with third baseman Matt Chapman. Posey has shown little desire for signing free agents who insist on opt-out clauses — a frequent inclusion for Boras clients in recent years — and little patience for negotiations that do not end swiftly. Because Posey’s former agent, one-time co-head of CAA Baseball Jeff Berry, is employed by the Giants as a senior advisor, perhaps it’s no coincidence that the two most significant signings of the Posey era (Adames and Vitello) have been CAA clients. But it stood to reason that there was a chance for Posey and Boras to find common ground over Imai, if only because the pitcher’s 45-day posting window ends Jan. 2. Posey also traveled to Japan last season to gain a first-hand understanding of the talent level there and to demonstrate his intent to compete for top players.
Just not right now, apparently.
The Giants plan to continue scouting and pursuing Pacific Rim talent even though they’ve come up short in their recent pursuits of Ohtani, Yamamoto, Kodai Senga, Seiya Suzuki and Roki Sasaki. Giants officials continue to believe that San Francisco should be an attractive cultural and geographic fit for top players from Nippon Professional Baseball. But it’s been over a decade since the last born-and-raised Japanese player they employed — left fielder Nori Aoki in 2015 — and embarrassingly, it’s been much longer since a Japanese player spent multiple seasons in a Giants uniform: it was left-hander Masanori Murakami, the pioneering reliever who became the first Japanese major leaguer when he pitched for the team in 1964-65.
For now, the franchise’s Hikikomori, self-imposed or otherwise, will continue. Call it a stalled pursuit.