Tonight, the Astros play the 13th game of 13 games in a row without an off day. A win against the Twins in the rubber match would give the Astros a 9-4 record over the stretch and would mark their 6th series win in a row. The Astros have not dropped a series since June 10, when the lost 2 of 3 to the Angels.
For the month of June, the Astros went 16-11, the top record in the AL, tied with the Rangers.
Tatsuya Imai vs. Taj Bradley
Tatsuya Imai pitches for the Astros. He had a great outing his last time out, allowing just 2 hits and no runs over 6 innings in a 10 strikeout performance with just 1 walk, in a win against the Jays. In his last two starts, he’s thrown 12 innings and recorded 21 punchouts and just 1 walk. These 2 starts came on the heels of a terrible start where he couldn’t get out of the first inning (for the second time this season.)
in 11 starts, Imai has had 6 sensational starts where he seems like he should be a Cy candidate and 5 starts where it seemed like he had no business being the the majors. You can see why after Imai’s last win, TLA editor Cody Poage could only refer to the Japanese import as “an enigma”.
The combined no-hitter on May 25, where he threw 6 innings, seems like an inflection point in his trajectory, specifically the end of the first inning of that game. Of his 5 “bad” games, only 1 came after the no-hitter.
| Tatsuya Imai – 2026 | Before 5/25 | 5/25 to now |
|---|---|---|
| Games | 5 | 6 |
| Record | 1-2 | 4-1 |
| Quality Starts | 0 | 4 |
| Innings/Start | 3.5 | 4.9 |
| ERA | 8.31 | 3.64 |
| WHIP | 1.79 | 1.04 |
| K/9 | 10.9 | 11.22 |
| BB/9 | 7.27 | 3.34 |
| HR/9 | 2.08 | 0.61 |
| xERA | 6.16 | 2.95 |
| FIP | 6.62 | 2.70 |
| xFIP | 4.74 | 3.08 |
| SIERA | 4.88 | 3.25 |
| BA | .258 | .187 |
| xBA | .246 | .206 |
| xwOBA | .381 | .270 |
| Whiff% | 34.6% | 30.7% |
2026 season thru 6/30/26. Source: Fangraphs and Baseball Savant
It was a rough start, but the no-hitter, even if his pitching in that game was as great as the results would have you believe, may have allowed Imai to turn the corner. If the Astros can get Hunter Brown and Imai to form a 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation, it will go a long way to making waves in the division race in the back half of the season.
Taj Bradley gets the call from the Twins. The 25 year old right hander is having his best year in the majors, with a 3.98 ERA, and a 6-3 record in 15 starts. He has a 1.28 WHIP, a 9.8 K/9 and 3.8 BB/9.
His last time out, he pitched 7 innings against the Rockies, allowing just 2 runs, striking out 7 and walking 3, and allowing just 3 hits. The Twins won, but it was a no-decision for Bradley, as somehow despite Bradley’s start, the Twins won with a score of 9-8 in extras.
Bradley is a fastball pitcher. He throws his 4 seamer about half the time, and it averages 96.8 mph and he’s hit a 100, with it. Here he is throwing 100 right down Broadway to freeze Bobby Witt, Jr. for strike 3:
He has 4 pitches, and 3 of them are fastball variants. Against righties, he mixes in his cutter, and sometimes his splitter and curve. The splitter sees more work against lefties.
The ball comes hard going in, but it also goes hard coming out. Bradley ranks 4th percentile in exit velocity; on average hitters lace balls at 91.7 mph off his offerings. Bradley also rnkas low in Hard-Hit% (9th percentile) and Barrel% (16th percentile).
The Astros are good fastball hitting team, so this may be a favorable matchup for them.
Twins @ Astros Game Information and Gamethread Details
The game will be broadcast at 7:10 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.
This post will be updated with starting lineup as they are made available.
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Feature photo from @astros on X, Source Link.
I almost wrote an article on Imai’s Stuff+ anomaly, but put it off to see what my conclusions are like after today. Basically, I believe that Stuff+ does a poor job evaluating Imai’s stuff. (It probably does a better job of evaluating his Location+). The reason? Stuff+ relies upon Baseball Savant data which gets fooled too much by its classification of his pitches. We know that the slider can turn two different directions. Though thrown with the same grip it’s two or three different pitches, based on different approaches to releasing the ball. Furthermore, two of his pitches (sinker and split finger) are poorly classified by Baseball Savant. Reportedly Savant had to retroactively reclassify a number of his sinkers as 4 seam FBs. It also appears that some of the split finger pitches get mistakenly classified as change ups or sliders. Stuff+ expects pitches classified as sliders, sinkers, 4 seamers, etc. to move in a particular way and grades the stuff based on that expectation. For example, in his prior game, Imai’s slider had Stuff+ in the low 90’s (basically mediocre) but the swing strike rate on the pitch was almost 30%. The stuff was playing well but Stuff+ didn’t give it equivalent grades. My guess is that Stuff+ doesn’t expect the slider to move the wrong way and treats it like a mistake. (I’m not the only one who notices this: a FG rotographs article mentioned the same problem with relying on Stuff+ to grade Imai’s slider). So, while I normally like to rely on Stuff+ to evaluate pitches, in Imai’s case, I probably won’t.