☀️ Good Morning:
A minor-league park might be just what Brett Baty needs.
The young infielder might not have many big-league lives left, at least not with a healthy Mets team, but he has this weekend, and perhaps a few weeks beyond that to prove he can hit more than Triple-A pitching.
Luisangel Acuña will likely get the start tonight against a left-hander, but Baty can still make his mark over the final two games of the weekend. It would be nice if either player contributes something offensively.
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🦎 Changing Senga
Everyone knows Kodai Senga is an X-Factor this season. Most important will be how he is pitching come August, September, and hopefully, October. It’s been a long wait for him to return healthy on a regular pitching schedule. He’s still not completely ramped up. But with two starts under his belt, we can at least begin to evaluate how he looks compared to previous seasons.
ARMSIDE: The most noticeable change to Senga’s profile is the addition of armside movement.
He is throwing from a similar arm angle as last year, a few degrees off from a more over-the-top approach in his debut season.
But there’s something more at play, perhaps in his grips, because we are seeing several inches of added run in each of his pitches (most notably, with his patented fork ball).
As a result, we have a pitcher whose stuff is grading a bit lower, but who is inducing softer contact based on the location of his pitches.
SWEEP LEFT: Another interesting takeaway from his first two starts is the shape and usage of his sweeper. We saw him experiment with it during the spring, believing it could be an added weapon to use against right-handed batters who are less inclined to swing at his forkball.
What we are seeing, over a very small sample, is a pitch that he is starting to use as a disguise to his forkball, mostly against lefties. He is achieving this by throwing his sweeper on a similar horizontal plane as his forkball. As you can see in the chart below, it puts his sweeper in a unique movement category.
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