Another tumultuous season for Kodai Senga came to an unsatisfactory end, and Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns made it clear that he can’t rely on the veteran right-hander for much in 2026.
Senga finished New York’s postseason-less 2025 season in the minor leagues after struggling so much upon his return from a hamstring injury suffered in June that he agreed to be demoted to work on his mechanics. The 32-year-old began the year looking like the ace the Mets expected him to be, posting a 1.39 ERA across his first 14 starts.
In his final nine outings of the season, his ERA swelled to 5.90.
It was the second straight season that Senga was undone by injuries. In 2024, he appeared in only five regular-season frames after dealing with shoulder and calf issues and was ineffective in a couple of postseason outings.
“Kodai Senga has had two inconsistent and challenging years in a row,” Stearns said. “We know it’s in there, we know there’s potential. We’re going to do everything we can to help get it out of him. But could we put him in ink as making 30 starts next year? That would be foolish.”
When Senga is healthy and clicking, he is one of the best pitchers in baseball, thanks to his ghost forkball, one of the game’s most devastating pitches. But his mechanics were simply out of whack during the second half of the season, and not even the lesser pressure of the minor leagues could help him figure it out.
His first start provided enough hope that he could figure it out in a flash, allowing one run on three hits with eight strikeouts and zero walks in six innings with Triple-A Syracuse. But he regressed his next time out, allowing four runs on six hits in 3.2 innings of work.
Multiple bullpen sessions didn’t help, either, as Mets manager Carlos Mendoza admitted last week that things were just “not clicking.”
Now, Senga faces an offseason in which he admittedly has to begin from square one, as that hamstring injury that ultimately turned the Mets’ season upside down had a more serious impact than first realized.
“I wasn’t able to control my body the way I wanted to after that injury,” Senga said. “Unfortunately, that showed up in the results on-field, too… I want to rebuild from step one. My body has changed after this injury and after various things.”
