Japanese pitcher Kodai Senga and the New York Mets have agreed on a five-year, $75 million contract, according to MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand.
The 29-year-old right-hander spent the past 11 years pitching for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). He signed with the Hawks out of high school after being taken in the fourth round of the 2010 draft. He has spent the vast majority of his career as a reliever, pitching to a 2.59 ERA over 224 games and 1,089 innings, with 1,252 strikeouts and 414 walks. He’s a three-time NPB All-Star and has won two Mitsui Golden Glove Awards, as well as a gold medal at the 2020 Summer Olympics as part of Team Japan, which beat Team USA 2-0.
Senga’s arsenal is superb and that is why he has been on MLB radars for years. His fastball averages in the upper-90s, his four-seamer is impressive, and his splitter — a forkball known as the “ghost fork” — is devastating. Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto recently called it a “special pitch” and said it might be the best splitter in the world.
Senga has been trying to get to MLB since at least 2017, when he tried and failed to convince the Hawks to post him. The Hawks are the only NPB team to never post a player (the posting system was first implemented in 1998), and they’ve publicly said that they never intend to use the system.
Senga tried to get the Hawks to place him every year from 2017 to 2021, once even taking team president Yoshimitsu Goto out to dinner to make his case, but they never budged. Instead, he gained international free-agent rights for the first time after the 2022 season, his 11th in pro ball, and now he’s finally on his way to Major League Baseball.