Sunday afternoon saw Kodai Senga pitch into the seventh inning for the first time since Sept. 1, 2023. He was also the first Mets pitcher to go seven innings in a game this season.
The 32-year-old right-hander went seven scoreless innings during New York’s 8-0 win over the Athletics, flashing the brilliance that had him finish in the top two of the NL Rookie of the Year voting and the top 10 of the Cy Young voting two years ago.
Senga allowed four hits and walked another two while striking out four. Through his first three starts (17 innings), he has a 1.06 ERA and 16 punchouts.
“I think it’s a great stepping stone to get my body to adapt so I can throw further into the game and continuously throughout the season,” Senga said. “There are things throughout the game that I wish I could do better, but at the same time, things are feeling a lot better. So I’m getting close.”
The Mets are relying on Senga to be the ace he was two years ago despite an injury-riddled 2024 campaign that limited him to just 5.1 regular-season innings. The build-up to a regular workload has been a slow one because of it, especially when considering the lighter burden that is put on Japanese pitchers in Nippon Professional Baseball, where he spent a decade pitching.
It is why Senga got the hook after seven despite throwing just 79 pitches, even if his manager Carlos Mendoza was tempted to trot him out for the eighth.
“I thought about it,” Mendoza said. “But we’ve been keeping him at five innings the whole time and it’s already a big jump at seven innings. We were looking at 85 pitches, and after that long inning because of the offense [the Mets scored twice in the top of the seventh and sent eight men to the plate] I thought that was enough for him.”
Senga admitted that he is still only at “80 to 90%” but Sunday provided a glimpse of just how good he can be when he truly is where he wants to be.
