Kodai Senga Limits Damage Despite Facing Traffic

Kodai Senga was far from perfect on Wednesday night. He did do his best to give the New York Mets every opportunity to win, however.

In the wake of a 4-1 defeat to the lowly Washington Nationals – the Mets’ fourth loss in a row – very few came out of another frustrating night with any credit. Senga can be placed in that minority.

While his outing against the Nationals was far from pretty, he at least battled throughout to try and limit the damage and prevent the game from being a complete blowout.

That doesn’t mean it was a total success for Senga, however. Although he allowed just two runs, he did walk four batters and give up five hits. He also threw one wild pitch and consistently gave himself a mountain to climb early on in innings. He led off an inning with a walk three separate times.

Senga has had success with his “ghost forkball” – a pitch that Mets fans have quickly embraced – and his fastball, but a lack of command across all of his pitches have been the big problem. That was the case yet again on Wednesday. He threw his forkball 20 times, but got just six swings on the pitch (30 percent). That lack of command led to Senga throwing 94 pitches in just five innings.

7 strikeouts tonight for @kodaisenga pic.twitter.com/gcnojqsJO2

— SNY (@SNYtv) April 27, 2023

“I just didn’t have very good control early on in the game and that just led on and led to the high pitch count,” Senga said after the game. “A lot of my forkballs weren’t executed very well and it is no different than in Japan, if it isn’t executed well, they’re not going to swing at it. Nothing to fret about, if I can execute it they’re probably going to swing at it. All of my pitches need to be executed better.”

To give credit to Senga, he doesn’t allow adversity to impact him and he was able to grind through his outing while allowing minimal damage. He leaned on the strikeout throughout the night, striking out a total of seven batters in order to navigate the constant flow of traffic. Despite constantly finding himself in deep trouble to start innings, he was able to buckle down and rack up strikeouts in order to escape largely unscathed.

However, by making life difficult for himself early, Senga hurt his team by not being able to go deep in the game. That has been a trend early on in his Mets career. He needed 48 pitches just to get through the second inning, meaning he was done after five after throwing just shy of 100 pitches. With the starting rotation absolutely ravaged by injury – and suspension in Max Scherzer‘s case – manager Buck Showalter badly needed some length from Senga on Wednesday.

“I do think I was able to handle the ball a little bit better towards the end, but I need to be able to do that right from the get-go,” Senga said. “Given the pitch count, I want to go deeper into the game and, in order for me to be able to do that, I need to start up hot. Nothing in the game directly had an impact on my pitching, it was more within myself mechanically. I just happened to get in the groove, as Buck would say, in the latter half but, looking ahead to my next start, it’s something I need to do right from the get-go.”

There was always going to be growing pains for Senga this early on in his career in America, that was a given. However, his margin for error has shrunk dramatically given the sorry state the rest of the starting rotation is currently in. In saying that though, while he needs to work on his command and be able to go deeper into games, the fact he was able to keep on fighting and prevent the Nationals from piling up the runs despite giving up a slew of walks should be seen as a big positive for the Mets.

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