When discussing the National League Cy Young candidates, everybody talks about Justin Steele, Spencer Strider, Blake Snell, and Zac Gallen.
Very few people remember about a certain New York Mets pitcher named Kodai Senga.
Senga is a Cy Young candidate?
Yes, that’s right: it might sound hard to believe, but the numbers say he has a case.
A 2.95 ERA in 27 starts and 155.1 innings should at least put him in the conversation.
He uses a wide array of pitches to keep rival hitters at bay, but the best one by far is the so-called “ghost forkball”.
It’s really a forkball but it’s so nasty that the “ghost” goes nicely in the name, doesn’t it?
Here, we can see the best pitches in baseball when it comes to generating swings and misses, courtesy of MLB Network.
Swing and a miss 👻 pic.twitter.com/OCAzRJcQqQ
— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) September 15, 2023
As you can see, the ghost forkball leads the way with an incredible 60-percent whiff rate.
That’s whiff per swing, not whiffs per pitch.
It means that for every 10 swings hitters take against Senga’s ghost forkball, they find nothing but air six times.
That’s outrageous.
He has accumulated 191 strikeouts in those 155.1 innings, and it’s mainly because he uses the rest of his arsenal to set up his nasty out pitch.
When hitters have two strikes, they know the forkball is coming, but they still can’t do anything about it.
The Mets did many things wrong in 2023, but signing Senga to a long-term deal was definitely one of the few that went right.
He will headline their rotation for four more seasons.
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