Senga shows he belongs after 1st spring outing

JUPITER, Fla. -- One of the beauties of baseball in the spring is that there are days, even in the first week of March, that feel as if they are something more. It was that way on Sunday, the Mets against the Cardinals, when Kodai Senga made his first start in this country after a long and distinguished career in Japan. Senga is 30, which means he is no kid. He was still the new guy on Sunday in Jupiter.

“Think about the journey he’s made to this moment,” Buck Showalter said in his small office at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium about an hour before Senga took the ball, and the mound.

Then Showalter added, “He had to earn his way everywhere.”

Senga was about to encounter a pitch timer in a real game. He was also about to encounter hitters like Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado. So this did feel like a moment for him and a big one, even when he was warming up and Mets fans had crowded down to where he was throwing warmup pitches down past third base, along with several photographers from Japan.

And then there were two men on, nobody out, because he’d gone to full counts on Brendan Donovan and Tyler O’Neill and walked them both, in what felt like a blink.

Senga said later he wasn’t nervous. But how could he not be? This wasn’t back-field throwing up the road in Port St. Lucie, Fla., now.

“I was rushing,” he would say later through an interpreter.

What does that commercial say? Life comes at you fast, even in Spring Training. But at that point, a very cool baseball thing happened: Senga began to pitch, even as you were worrying that he might be on his way to throwing all 40 pitches the Mets wanted him to throw in the bottom of the first.

Goldschmidt, the reigning MVP of the National League, hit a pop to short. Arenado lined out to right. Then came Jordan Walker, one of the game’s top prospects who has been hitting balls hard all spring. When Senga got two strikes on him, he threw what is known as his “ghost pitch,” which sounds like fun but is hardly mystical. You can just call it a splitter or a forkball. But what it became against Walker was strike three as Senga buried him with it, an offspeed spinner that just dropped out of sight, like a gull diving into the water.

The pitch impressed his manager, but not nearly as much as Senga’s demeanor as he walked off the mound and toward the Mets' dugout on the third-base side.

“He acted as if he’s been there before,” Buck said. “He’s struck out a lot of hitters in his career. He’d turned this into another day at the office.”

It wasn’t, of course. The Mets paid him $75 million over five years because of the 11 seasons he’d pitched with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and finally becoming a star with them. They need him to be a major piece of their rotation behind great pitching stars like Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. And this would be a day when José Quintana, somebody else Showalter, pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and general manager Billy Eppler are counting on as an important piece of the back end of the rotation, left the game that Senga had started with left side tightness -- never good just over three weeks from the start of the regular season.

Senga would end up throwing 42 pitches, occasionally topping 98 mph on the radar gun. Even when he was scuffling early, he busted pitches in on Arenado that produced foul balls. He would get another strikeout in the second, against Nolan Gorman, before Tres Barrera jumped all over a hanger and knocked it over the left-field wall. But Senga came back to pop out Masyn Winn to second. A long way from the SoftBank Hawks, he was on the board. This wasn’t just a moment for him, it was a moment for the Mets.

“I was just happy to pitch in a real game,” Senga would say when it was over.

Showalter spoke before the game how Senga was never a phenom in Japan, even though coming to the Major Leagues at this point in his career has turned him into a bit of one, and a curiosity. But he showed his manager a lot on Sunday, because he showed everybody a lot, and not just with his fastball and breaking balls and intelligence. He had gotten rocked early, not by long balls, just by those two walks and then what he did was figure a way out of trouble, against Goldschmidt and Arenado, who had been there before.

“I’ll tell you something else,” Showalter said later. “Once he did stop rushing a little, he handled [the timer] a whole lot better than some other guys I’ve seen this spring.”

Senga handled a lot on Sunday, in just a couple of innings. And showed you a lot. A start that was a new beginning for the new guy. Some days are different in the spring. They just are.