“I know everybody was talking about Yamamoto,” Sox manager Alex Cora said Friday afternoon. “But this guy is good, too.”
A few hours later, the Sox got a striking glimpse of the pitcher they’d courted in a 7-1 loss to the Cubs at Fenway Park in the series opener. Imanaga (4-0, 0.98 ERA) dazzled in 6⅓ innings, allowing just five hits while striking out seven and walking one, to allow Chicago to cruise to a road victory witnessed by 31,801 fans — many of them Cubs partisans.
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Imanaga featured a low-90s fastball that exploded at the top of the strike zone and a splitter that dove beneath it. When the Red Sox started taking better hacks against those two offerings, Imanaga confounded with an array of breaking balls.
It was the sort of performance that has typified the start of Imanaga’s MLB career, and one that hardly shocked Red Sox onlookers.
“Hard to say he would go out and have a [sub-1] ERA through his first few turns, but we knew he’s a really, really talented pitcher,” Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said prior to Imanaga’s outing. “It was impossible to know exactly what he’d be, but the talent and the performance he’d demonstrated in Japan in conjunction with what we felt like he could do here, put it all together, it was really attractive.”
The Sox, according to a major league source, were the first team to make an offer to Imanaga last offseason, putting a two-year, $26 million deal on the table shortly after he’d been posted for bidding by the Yokohama BayStars. But Imanaga’s agents believed he would have a more robust market.
Ultimately, they were proven right when Imanaga — who was based out of Chicago during his posting period and became enamored of the Windy City — signed a four-year, $53 million deal with the Cubs that could be worth as much as $80 million over five years. The Sox declined to match — a stance driven by a number of factors, including (according to multiple major league sources) a guaranteed term of more years for a player about whom they had medical concerns.
And so it was that the proceedings on Friday came with a “what-might-have-been” thought bubble.
Imanaga outpitched Red Sox counterpart Kutter Crawford, who entered the night with a 0.66 ERA while having allowed just three runs (two earned) in 27⅓ innings through five starts. On Friday, the Cubs surpassed that year-long total, scoring four runs (three earned) with Crawford on the mound.
The Cubs took a 2-0 lead in the second inning on four hits, including run-scoring singles by Matt Mervis and Pete Crow-Armstrong, then tacked on an unearned run — the major league-worst 28th allowed by the Sox this year — in the fourth.
With Dansby Swanson on first and one out, third baseman Pablo Reyes had a throwing error on a routine grounder, putting runners on the corners with one out. Crow-Armstrong followed with a safety squeeze, but after Crawford initially looked Swanson back to third, the shortstop broke for the plate when the pitcher threw to first, scoring easily to put the Cubs ahead, 3-0.
After Imanaga retired the first 10 Red Sox hitters of the game, the Sox got a run back when Tyler O’Neill got on top of a fastball at the top of the strike zone and lined a solo homer into the first row of the center-field bleachers.
It was O’Neill’s eighth longball of the year, and his eighth straight bases-empty round-tripper. (The last player with more consecutive solo homers at the start of his Red Sox career was Shane Victorino, whose first nine longballs in 2013 came with no one on base.) O’Neill finished 2 for 4, the lone Sox to collect multiple hits, in his most encouraging game since returning from the seven-day concussion injured list.
“Every game that I’m out there, feeling more and more comfortable, getting that rhythm back,” said O’Neill.
But the Cubs quickly widened the gap, adding a run in the fifth against Crawford (1-1, 1.35) — part of a 10-hit, four-run (three earned) attack against the righthander. Still, on a night when he lacked his best stuff, Crawford pounded the strike zone (79 percent strikes) and navigated six innings.
“If that’s the bad one, we’ll take it,” said Cora.
Crawford concurred.
“Every time I get that ball I want to try to go at least six,” said Crawford. “Overall, I can’t have my head down on a night like this. My main goal every time I take that ball is to try to throw as many strikes as possible and attack hitters and I feel like when I look back at this outing I was able to do that.”
When Crawford departed, the game remained in reach. That proximity, however, was short-lived.
The Cubs scored three times against reliever Joely Rodriguez in the seventh. The 7-1 deficit was insurmountable for a Sox team that is 3-8 at Fenway while averaging 3.3 runs per home game (24th in MLB) and ranking second-worst in the big leagues in home batting average (.198) and OBP (.266).
“We’ve had some big guys go down,” said O’Neill, alluding to the losses of Triston Casas and Trevor Story. “It’s tough when that happens, but it’s up to the rest of us to step up and do everything we can.”
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.