It didn’t take long for the Astros’ offseason plan to build pitching depth to get hit by a familiar problem: injuries.
The Houston Astros spent the offseason beefing up their pitching depth after a 2025 season ravaged by injuries. Less than a month into the 2026 campaign, that depth is already facing its first major challenge.
The Astros brought in several right-handed arms, including Tatsuya Imai, Mike Burrows, Kai-Wei Teng, and Ryan Weiss, for injury insurance and to lighten workloads. Instead, those same arms are being pushed into bigger roles almost immediately.
Most of them have little major league experience, and asking them to handle real innings this early is not an easy ask. With two rotation spots already open in a planned six-man setup, injuries to Hunter Brown and Cristian Javier now push that number closer to three.
How these arms handle the pressure will shape the early season, and no one is under more pressure than Tatsuya Imai.
Imai’s contract puts the Astros in a no-win spot. The opt-outs after 2026 and 2027 mean every outcome comes with a catch. If he pitches well, he likely prices himself out of Houston. If he struggles, the Astros are left paying for it anyway with little flexibility.
Imai can earn a $3 million raise each year if he reaches 100 innings, which only adds more pressure on both performance and durability. Houston is already dealing with long-term money tied to Lance McCullers Jr. and Cristian Javier, and another underwhelming contract would only tighten things further, potentially in the $18 to $21 million range, according to sources.
With Hunter Brown, the pitching staff anchor out, Imai is now being asked to step into a role that looks closer to an ace than a mid-rotation arm. With no clear timeline for Brown’s return and more uncertainty behind him, the margin for error keeps shrinking.
The reality is that there is no clean outcome here. Even the middle ground is messy, with inconsistency potentially holding him in place while dragging the team down.
Early signs already point to the same issue, inconsistency. His first game had control problems, and his second showed he can shake off the nerves and flash real upside, but it still was not fully clean. He has dealt with similar inconsistency before in Japan, and that is the main concern for Houston. The real question for Houston is whether he can be steady every time he takes the mound.