Toronto Fortifies Lineup With Kazuma Okamoto Signing

On Saturday, the eve of his posting window’s closure, 29-year-old Japanese third baseman Kazuma Okamoto agreed to a four-year, $60 million contract with the reigning American League champion Toronto Blue Jays. Okamoto, who made his NPB debut as a teenager, is a career .277/.361/.521 hitter with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants. He had a power-hitting breakout in 2018, his age-22 campaign, beginning a six-year streak in which he hit 30 or more annual home runs, including a 2023 season in which he cracked 41 of them. He ranks second in all of NPB with 214 homers since 2019, our first year of NPB data tracking here at FanGraphs. During his 2025 platform year, Okamoto posted an incredible .327/.416/.598 line and career-best 11% strikeout rate, albeit in only 77 games because he sprained his left elbow in an on-field collision that caused him to miss roughly half the season.

Dangerous from top to bottom, lineup depth was the bedrock of a Toronto team that came within inches of winning a World Series, and Okamoto’s balanced contact/power hitting style fits in with the Blue Jays’ baton-passing attack. Pre-existing defensive versatility on their roster — namely, incumbent second baseman Andrés Giménez’s ability to play shortstop — gave them the flexibility to pursue players of virtually any position as a means of replacing free agent shortstop Bo Bichette.

Okamoto’s deal is slightly backloaded; he’s getting a $5 million signing bonus and has a $7 million salary in 2026, then makes $16 million per season in each of the final three years. The Blue Jays also paid a posting fee of $10.875 million to Yomiuri, making their total outlay $70.875 million. That amount is right in line with the expert and crowd sourcing estimates of 3-4 years and $15-18 million AAV, as published in Ben Clemens’ Top 50 Free Agents list, on which Okamoto ranked 21st. My evaluation of Okamoto was a little weightier; I think he’s going to hit (more on that in a moment) and produce in the range of 2.0-2.5 WAR per year, player quality befitting a $20-25 million AAV.

Despite the structure of the contract, it’s the $15 million average annual value of the deal that informs Toronto’s payroll calculation as it pertains to the luxury tax. Per RosterResource, the Blue Jays 2026 projected luxury tax payroll is now $308 million, second highest in all of baseball and in excess of the final luxury tax threshold. This has been an all-in 12-month period for the Blue Jays, during which they’ve dished out multiple long-term, sometimes nine-figure, contracts headlined by Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s $500 million extension in April. The 2026 season will be Toronto’s second consecutive year in excess of the luxury tax threshold, but with several high-dollar contracts expiring after the season, the team’s 2027 commitments will dip way down to an estimated $218 million, low enough to reset its luxury tax penalty percentage if anything remotely close to the current CBA’s structure is retained in 2027 and beyond.

Okamoto made stark contact improvements during the last couple of years, generating the two lowest strikeout rates of his career in 2024 (15.9%) and 2025 (11.3%), while also improving his splits against harder fastballs; he’s had an 89% contact rate against all fastballs and an 87% contact rate against heaters 94 mph and above across the last three seasons. That 94-plus mph fastball split is only derived from a 350-pitch sample during that three-year span, and there’s inherent volatility in projecting how Japanese hitters will adjust to MLB pitching because they’re underexposed to premium velocity, but in Okamoto’s case at least, the data we have is positive and corroborates the visual evaluation of his talent. Early in his career, he was crushing a lot of hanging breaking balls, but of late he’s been more often on time to pull fastballs with power, and his spray chart includes a ton of contact straight down the left field line, which is a player characteristic the Blue Jays seem to target.

Because Okamoto is so geared to pull, he does make some concessions against well-located secondary pitches away from him, though none of his splits against any particular pitch type are especially scary. He tracks pitches well, moves the barrel around the zone (especially the upper half), and is a pretty stable bat-to-ball “prospect” for an NPB player. He lacks the light-tower power of a superstar corner infielder, but he has enough to be dangerous, and I think he’ll hit enough to profile as an average regular, especially at third base.

Okamoto has spent the majority of his career playing third base, with some first base and left field mixed in. The way the dominoes fall for the Blue Jays’ defensive alignment seems pretty clear; with Guerrero entrenched at first base, Okamoto is going to spend most of his time at third. Okamoto can show you nimble lower body stability and has feel for bouncing off the dirt and spinning into accurate throws, but he lacks range and struggles making plays to his glove side. There are many similar major league third basemen (Max Muncy comes to mind) who are flawed, but playable. Okamoto’s presence will probably force Addison Barger to spend more time in the outfield, and Ernie Clement (also a flawed defender, with an odd throwing stroke and sketchy accuracy) to mostly slide to second base. With injured/aging George Springer and Anthony Santander currently occupying projected DH and outfield spots in Toronto’s starting lineup, it’s not crazy to think Okamoto might also need to stand in left field on occasion just to give the older guys a breather. There are going to be lots of different ways to get his bat into the lineup by playing matchups at the corner positions the way manager John Schneider did successfully throughout 2025 with Barger, Clement, and Davis Schneider, among others. Overall, I expect Okamoto to perform like a top 12-15 player at his position, hit something like .250 with 20 or so annual bombs while playing below average defense, albeit at a couple different spots that allows Toronto to field its best overall lineup on any given day.