With huge question marks surrounding the Mets rotation, the team and Kodai Senga were hoping for a long outing Thursday night against the San Francisco Giants.
And early on, it looked like Senga would easily be able to pitch six or seven innings to give the beleaguered bullpen a rest. Unfortunately, one bad inning derailed their plans.
“I know he’s a little frustrated because he wanted to have a longer outing,” manager Buck Showalter said of Senga’s performance after the game. “We were hoping to get six or seven out of him tonight with the pitch count where it was.”
“Felt really good going into it [the game],” Senga said through the team translator. “I’ve only been pitching five innings or so [in recent starts] but I was hoping to get deeper into the game.”
After pitching 5.1 and 6.0 innings in his first two starts, respectively, the last two have been a little shaky. We had that 4.2 inning performance against the Oakland A’s on April 14 — the game the Mets walked 18 times and scored 17 runs — and this most recent start.
In the series opener against the Giants. Senga went five innings, which is respectable and good enough to pick up the win and improve to 3-0 in the season, but he was in line to go much further. Entering the fifth inning, Senga only threw 55 pitches. And with the Mets up 5-0, Senga was in full control.
The pesky Giants, however, would power and scratch four runs in that fifth inning. Senga would eventually get out of it, but it took 30 pitches and Showalter saw enough from his starter.
When asked after the game what he thought it was, Senga said it was his location and the veteran manager agreed, but also added that the Japanese native is still adjusting to the majors.
“I think he’s still feeling his way around it,” Showalter said. “He’s pitching in cold weather, not that he hasn’t before, but there’s a lot of adjustments he’s still making. He’s going to find his way and it’s a pretty good way so far.”
Senga is 3-0 with a 4.29 ERA and 25 strikeouts in 21 innings pitched in four starts. Impressive for the 30-year-old, but with so much hype around him and his patented ghost-fork, there may be some who expected more dominance.
Not Senga, though.
“I didn’t expect to be dominating right out of the gate,” he said. “In previous outings I made bad pitches and they hit them. Today I feel like I made good pitches and they still hit me. That’s something to fix moving forward and fill in the role of a starter.”
With Max Scherzer serving a 10-game suspension, and Justin Verlander, Jose Quintana and Carlos Carrasco on the IL, the Mets may need to lean on Senga — along with David Peterson and Taylor Megill — more than they anticipated before the season started.
Senga, though, has largely answered the call in giving this Mets rotation some stability out of the game this season. And that doesn’t look to change any time soon.