Injured ace Senga blames mechanical issue for shoulder woes
PORT ST. LUCIE — Kodai Senga said bad mechanics were to blame for his early spring training shoulder injury.
“I think it’s just a mechanical issue,” the Mets right-hander said Thursday through translator Hiro Fujiwara. “I was supposed to throw a certain way and I wasn’t able to mimic that motion. Simple.”
Senga was diagnosed with a mild strain in the right posterior capsule in his shoulder. The Mets expect him to start the season on the injured list.
The injury didn’t occur at a specific time, but it grew concerning after his arm failed to recover as quickly as usual after he threw bullpen sessions and side sessions over the last few weeks in camp. Although Senga has been working on a new pitch in spring training, it’s not one he has thrown at gamelevel intensity yet, so he felt that it was “irrelevant” to the injury.
Much like the last few years, the team will be without an ace to start the season. Jacob degrom and Max Scherzer went down in 2022 and Justin Verlander was injured to start the 2023 campaign.
However, there is no sense of panic in Port St. Lucie. Senga could have worked through this injury and progressed through spring training on a normal timeline. But his pitches weren’t what he wanted them to be and the discomfort he felt in his throwing shoulder was concerning enough to alert the trainers.
“Not being at 100% definitely puts a hamper on my performance,” Senga said. “If I was asked, ‘Can you throw 96, 97, 98?’ Yeah, I can throw 96, 97, 98, but the game isn’t about throwing fast, it’s about getting hitters out. I felt like, at this point, I’m not going to be able to perform at the highest level, so taking a little bit of time was the right move.”
The 31-year-old Senga, who came over from Japan last season, previously felt the same type of shoulder discomfort around 2017 when he was converted to a full-time starter with his Nippon Professional Baseball team, Fukuoka Softbank, but otherwise has no other history of shoulder injuries.