With the Chicago Cubs making Shōta Imanaga a one-year, $22 million Qualifying Offer, I am somewhat comforted by the thought that Shane Bieber’s decision to take one year and $12 million, and Jack Flaherty’s decision to take one year and $20 million, were not necessarily harbingers that the market is going to be profoundly disrupted this offseason. More importantly, it heartened me that the Cubs are not going to be so precious about their spending that they couldn’t possibly justify $22 million on Imanaga. That said, the fact of Bieber’s and Flaherty’s decisions, personal and idiosyncratic as they might be, do suggest that pitchers in this tier cannot necessarily assuming they’ll find a monster multi-year deal out there right now. And for Imanaga, a guy coming off a down second half, who is 32, and whose velocity and stuff took a step back this year, it’s fair to wonder how much he could realistically expect in free agency. That goes double now that, if he actually heads into free agency, he’ll cost his signing team draft pick(s) and IFA bonus pool space. So, then, it seems awfully plausible that Shōta Imanaga will simply accept the Cubs’ offer and return to the team on a one-year deal, right? Well, I was interested to see the national perspective on a question like that, since we haven’t yet dug into contract projections for Imanaga. There were options decisions to sort out, after all. At The Athletic, Tim Britton, who hadn’t initially projected a contract for Imanaga, was asked about where things go from here: ‘With the Cubs turning down Imanaga’s three-year option, what could he expect to get on the market? I am guessing a qualifying offer would dampen interest. Could the Cubs get him back for two years and $35 million? —Tom C. I eventually projected Shota Imanaga at just the one-year, $22 million mark for the qualifying offer because accepting that makes some sense for him. He’s going to be 32, which means a team is unlikely to hand him more than a three-year deal, and I don’t see a team giving him a contract that long with a healthy AAV while also sacrificing a draft pick. The two-year, $35 million number you suggest is in the right ballpark, and at that point, Imanaga should probably just take the qualifying offer.’ To me, that all rings accurately. I have a hard time seeing anything more than a three-year deal for Shōta Imanaga right now, and I also have a very hard time seeing the AAV on such a deal being enough to justify him passing up on 1/$22M. Keep in mind, Imanaga already turned down his player option, which would’ve been two years and $30.5 million, with an opt out in the middle. He did that either thinking that he could do better in free agency, OR that he preferred the Qualifying Offer. In other words, the angle all along might’ve just been to get 1/$22M from the Cubs. Elsewhere, we do have a series of contract projections on Imanaga, all of which fall into roughly the same range. FanGraphs has him at two years and $40 million. MLBTR has him at three years and $45 million. ESPN has him at three years and $43.5 million. In other words, two or three years, an AAV between $14.5 million and $20 million, and a guarantee between $40 and $45 million. The question here is: how many suitors out there are paying that price while also losing the draft pick cost? Enough to justify Imanaga walking away from one year and $22 million? That’s what Shōta Imanaga and his reps will have to quickly suss out over the next 11 days. The Qualifying Offer decision is due by November 18. Which, by the way, is not to say Imanaga has to depart the Cubs if he rejects the offer. It could be that, after being out there in the market for a little while, he finds that the QO is a sufficient drag on his market that working out a new deal with the Cubs is the best approach. The sides might even come together on a new multi-year deal that splits the baby between the option he turned down (2/$30.5M) and the option the Cubs turned down (3/$57.5M). For now, though, simply accepting the Qualifying Offer seems like a plausible outcome, and one that the national projections would generally support.