On Monday night, Mets right-hander Kodai Senga looked like a pitcher on the mound for the first time in 10 days and making just his second start in over a month.
The sharpness from routine and the swings and misses from hitters looking to protect the strike zone as forkballs dive below the strike zone was nowhere to be found.
“It all comes down to mechanics,” Senga said after lasting just three laborious innings in what would end up being a 7-5 comeback win after the starter put them in an early hole.
Senga, who allowed the game's first batter to reach for the ninth time in 15 starts this year, surrendered four runs on four hits with three walks, including three two-out runs in a third inning that saw him throw 37 of 73 pitches. Monday's outing ended a streak of 31 starts of allowing three runs or fewer.
The diagnosis was pretty simple from manager Carlos Mendoza.
“I feel like he had a hard time with all of his pitches,” he said. “At times, he threw a couple of good splits. But then there were some of them that were non-competitive.
“He got away from his fastball a little bit, the cutter wasn’t a pitch. And then with two outs [in the third]... they got pitches to hit and then they didn’t miss ‘em.”
Senga’s diagnosis was not too dissimilar.
“I was thinking about a lot of things, and it didn’t come to fruition,” the right-hander said, speaking through an interpreter, before adding, “I used my brain quite a bit today.”
For Senga, who began the year with a 1.47 ERA over his first 73.2 innings before a stint on the IL cost him a month before returning for one outing before the All-Star break, the absence of thought was a good thing.
“I think, ideally, you’re so dominant that you don’t have to think about anything. But, obviously, it’s not easy,” Senga said. “Not thinking too much about myself, thinking about the opposing hitters is the most important thing.”
Perhaps the busy mind was the result of trying to figure out why the Angels hitters – who are some of the most likely strikeout candidates in the majors – seemed to show no interest in swinging at Senga’s forkball, which entered Monday’s start with a 42 percent whiff rate.
“I think towards the beginning of the game they were swinging when it was landing, but throughout the game maybe [I was] too heavy on the offspeed and not enough fastballs,” Senga said. “That’s a conversation we’ll have with the catchers and the pitching coaches.”
In all, Senga did manage five strikeouts and the forkball did garner six whiffs on seven swings, but it was taken for a ball 12 times. And overall, half of the 10 whiffs came on pitches thrown inside the strike zone. Notably, Senga looked displeased when he got Mike Trout swinging in the first inning when the future Hall of Fame slugger whiffed at a forkball that hovered into a dangerous spot.
Before his next start, Senga said he will reflect on what went wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The Mets will hope the thinking between starts will do the trick as they will look to continue to build him back up after he was capped at 80 pitches in his first start of the season’s second half.
