Kodai Senga’s top priority in his spring training debut: health.
The Mets have been playing it safe with the right-hander thus far in camp after he was limited to just one regular-season start and a handful of postseason appearances last year as he dealt with shoulder and calf injuries.
Senga has been progressing nicely in camp, and he was able to make it through Monday’s outing fine, allowing just two singles while throwing 31 pitches (21 strikes) and striking out two across two scoreless frames.
“It’s not always easy getting back into game mode,” Senga said through a translator. “My thought all along was to get back into a game once March rolls around and I felt good, so that’s what happened.
“I’m very pleased that I was able to get out of it healthy. There were a lot of things that I wanted to try out that I was able to, so it was just great to be back out there.”
Senga maxed out at 96 mph with his four-seam fastball and mixed in all of his pitches, including his gyro-slider and newly developed sinker, two pitches he’s been working on improving this offseason.
The slider looked particularly nasty as he used it to pick up his second strikeout of the evening on a 3-2 pitch to Miami’s Otto Lopez leading off the top of the second.
The sinker, while still a work in progress, is a pitch that Mets manager Carlos Mendoza feels could develop into a real weapon for Senga if he can get comfortable leaning on it in big spots.
“It’s a dangerous pitch,” the skipper said. “It’s a pitch that can get you groundballs if it’s running into right-handed hitters. He gets hitters off his splitter and his slider if that’s a pitch he can really use when he needs to.
“He can manipulate the baseball in a lot of different ways. Whether it’s down with the splitter, with the fastball, the slider, and then now adding that two-seam to the mix. It’s just another weapon he can lean on.”
With all of their injuries in their rotation, the Mets absolutely need a healthy and productive Senga leading the way this season — and Monday night’s outing was certainly an encouraging first step.
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