Let’s cut straight to what we want to know: Has Kodai Senga been good?
And how do we analyze his performance in the Mets’ 4-1 loss to the Nationals, not to mention his MLB career through five starts?
Senga’s debut on April 2 in Miami — 5 ⅓ innings, one run and a gritty mound presence — was an almost unqualified success. After navigating trouble early, he dominated the Marlins and flashed that “ghost” forkball that made him an international sensation before ever throwing an MLB pitch.
Since then, Senga has not performed well enough to become a phenomenon — notice the lack of “Sengamania” paraphernalia in existence — but he had not lost a game since Wednesday night, which dropped his record to 3-1. He has a 4.15 ERA and 1.58 WHIP.
In five innings against Washington on Wednesday, Senga allowed two runs, but it was far from pretty: He walked four batters, including three separate times to lead off an inning, allowed five hits and threw one wild pitch. On the other side of the ledger, he continued to show that bend-not-break competitive spirit when in trouble that is emerging as a defining characteristic.
There is no denying the quality of Senga’s best two pitches, the ghost fork and a fastball that he throws in the high-90s. But he is not commanding those pitches well enough, and while he threw the cutter more on Wednesday, he hasn’t settled the questions about that pitch that led some other teams to consider him essentially a two-pitch reliever when evaluating him as a free agent.
In his first game, Senga threw the ghost fork 26 times and got 14 swings (54 percent). In every game since, that percentage has declined:
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4/8 vs. Miami: 16 forkballs/6 swings (38 percent)
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4/14 at Oakland: 17 forkballs/6 swings (35 percent)
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4/26 vs. Washington: 20 forkballs/6 swings (30 percent)
I asked a smart front office-type if that was a meaningful decline, or if the most recent three were within the same basic statistical range. That front office-type provided a window into how analytically-inclined teams attacked these problems by saying that they would need a deeper statistical dive including in-zone swings against Senga, chase and miss for all locations.
Then I asked Senga himself to compare how MLB hitters were laying off the forkball versus what he had experienced as a star in Japan.
“A lot of my forkballs weren’t executed very well [Wednesday],” he said through a translator. “No different than in Japan, if it’s not executed well, they’re not going to swing at it. Nothing to fret about, really. If I can execute it they’re probably going to swing at it.”
Here’s the perspective of a scout in attendance Wednesday:
“I like his forkball. He is not commanding it and when he misses, he is missing by a wide enough margin that the hitters are not offering at it. I am sure that earlier this year, the command of his forkball was tighter and therefore more swings at it. It is decreasing but if he can get back to commanding it, it should improve his swings.”
Senga was indeed missing by a wide margin on Wednesday, not just with his forkball — which he spiked well short of home plate several times — but with his other pitches. When he missed with the fastball, he missed badly.
“All of my pitches need to be executed better,” Senga said. “When the forkball isn’t executed, it’s just driven into the ground off the plate. It just becomes an un-competitive pitch. So that’s something that needs to be worked on.”
One final suggestion about why the Nationals weren’t offering at the forkball came from a scout in attendance, who suggested that Senga was tipping it. Hitters knew it was coming and were able to lay off, the scout said.
“He has a tell with his hands,” one scout said. “The way the hitters are taking the pitches gave me a clue. I have not seen enough angles behind the catcher. To me his rest position is altered with his ghost.”
Manager Buck Showalter told SNY that he did not believe that to be the case (not that he would necessarily tell SNY if he did see evidence of tipping). His assessment echoed Senga’s: the pitch was too low.
“It’s a ball coming out of the hand,” Showalter said.
And maybe that was the only tell: The pitch was really low, sometimes even whistling through the grass.
It is the elite potential of Senga’s ghost fork that had led some folks in Metsland to wonder if, were the rotation healthy and whole, he would be the perfect replacement at closer for Edwin Diaz this year.
With so many other starters injured, that’s not even close to being realistic — and it wouldn’t work anyway until the forkball recovers from the deception that it featured earlier this month.