How the Mets landed rookie sensation Kodai Senga and what it means for this offseason

NEW YORK — Already impressed with Kodai Senga’s right arm, the New York Mets’ top decision-makers studied his face, eyes and body language. Before sitting down for their first meeting on a mid-November day at Citi Field, Senga toured the stadium while club officials noted his interactions with confidants.

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Manager Buck Showalter spent a lot of the day observing Senga in, to borrow from basketball parlance, “off-ball” moments.

“He had a competitive gleam in his eye,” Showalter said. “You could tell he wasn’t fearful of the competition.”

The Mets entered the meeting wondering how Senga, then a top free-agent pitcher from Japan, would handle the room, what questions he’d ask and what things he valued most.

“Playing here, it’s tough,” pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said. “Not only is it the biggest city in the world, the biggest baseball city in the world, you have all these things like needing to adjust to the ball, the food, the dirt, the travel, the media, everything else. It was going to take a special person to adapt quickly in Year 1.”

As Senga, 30, aims to put the finishing touches on an impressive rookie season with the Mets, it’s worth revisiting how the organization scouted and recruited him. That’s because their plans worked, and New York may need to draw from the experience again this offseason.

Starting with their meeting with Senga, the Mets plotted a path to best accommodate him in a new country and keep him healthy. In return, Senga has produced on a high level. In 25 starts and 143 1/3 innings, Senga owns a 3.08 ERA/3.47 FIP and 1.22 WHIP. Among qualified major-league pitchers, Senga’s 29.3 percent strikeout rate ranks fifth. While he also sports the third-worst walk rate (11 percent), he has held batters to the fourth-stingiest batting average (.208) because of an ability to evade contact, especially of the hard-hit variety. In a year in which so much went wrong for the Mets, Senga’s sensational season stands out as a rare positive.

After a hugely disappointing season, the upcoming offseason projects to be another consequential one for the Mets. They again should be in the market for starting pitching, with Japanese star Yoshinobu Yamamoto profiling as a sensible fit. Regardless of whom Mets owner Steve Cohen selects to be president of baseball operations, general manager Billy Eppler is expected to stay with the organization. Over the winter, Eppler’s efforts helped the Mets emerge as an attractive destination to Senga. Could the Mets make a similar impression on others this offseason?

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“Obviously, I don’t know what other teams would be offering to do for other players or what other teams would’ve done for me,” Senga said via translator Hiro Fujiwara, “but it’s a fact that what the Mets have done for me already has worked in a positive direction for myself.”

The Mets’ prior knowledge of Senga helped inform their opinion of him being a good fit for New York, and their meeting with him confirmed that belief.

Eppler scouted and helped sign Masahiro Tanaka while with the New York Yankees and Shohei Ohtani while with the Los Angeles Angels. He first learned of Senga in 2013. That year, Senga appeared in an NPB All-Star game, struck out five in two innings and made Eppler say to himself, “Who is this guy?”

All Eppler knew at the time was that Senga threw hard and possessed an impressive forkball. Soon, more information trickled in. Eppler studied Senga’s past, how he was drafted as a developmental player, and that he was being used as a setup reliever for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks entering the 2014 season. At that point, he placed Senga on a target list. From there, wherever Eppler worked, he told fellow officials, “If you see SoftBank, get a look.”

Last year, the Mets sent six different evaluators to Japan to see Senga. New York learned Senga had a condition in his contract that allowed him to move and that he was interested in playing in Major League Baseball. Therefore, they wanted to be prepared to merge recent analysis with historical knowledge. (Before Eppler’s arrival in late 2021, the Mets held reports on Senga within their internal system, too.) Eppler tapped the analytics team to pore over data. Eventually, he sent some video on Senga to Hefner, requesting feedback. In Senga, Hefner saw someone with a lot of upside.

Said Hefner, “We really wanted him.”

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Before leaving Japan, Senga planned to take a proactive approach to finding a new team in the U.S. He wouldn’t wait in Los Angeles and sit in an office as teams visited him. No, he would travel everywhere, he decided, get a feel for each city, meet everyone he could from each organization. In that way, Senga differed from other players coming over from Japan.

Senga didn’t arrive in New York City until late the night before the meeting with the Mets. At 2 a.m., he ate at a Japanese restaurant. By 8 a.m., he strolled the streets of Manhattan, shopping and sightseeing. By 11 a.m., he was ready to meet the Mets.

Senga, a Wasserman client, wanted to play in a big city. For the meeting with the Mets, Senga arrived at Citi Field with his agent, Joel Wolfe, and five other close associates. Senga’s entourage included a best friend from high school because he wanted someone else who knew him well to help him with the decision-making process — and that caught Showalter’s attention.

“His high school teammate or friend was with him and how they interacted was really impressive to me,” Showalter said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m Kodai, and you’re my valet.’ He treated him as an equal. You could tell that this was a guy who was going to fit in well in a locker room.”

In the moments leading up to the Mets’ critical presentation, Showalter phoned Hefner with a quick assessment.

“Hey, I really like this guy,” Showalter told Hefner, who was at home in Oklahoma and waiting to join the meeting via video. “This is exciting.”

Quickly, the meeting confirmed the Mets’ suspicions that Senga seemed like the kind of player who could thrive in New York. What everyone remembers most was how often Senga talked about wanting to win. He never mentioned individual awards. He said he wanted to play for a winner. He said he wanted to win a World Series.

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“I knew once he said that,” Hefner said, “that this could be a really good fit.”

Showalter said, “He was embracing the challenge here as opposed to just trying to cash a ticket.”

From Senga’s view, all of the talk of winning made the Mets’ meeting special.

“The biggest part was the Mets’ desire to win,” Senga said. “I could really feel that they wanted to win and they were doing everything they can to win. They told me how they were one step away from taking it further into the postseason last year, and how close they were to having a team that can win it all.”

Recalling the time, Senga smiled, then laughed before adding to his answer. The Mets didn’t end up winning much in 2023. They failed at such a profound level that they ended up selling at the trade deadline. In the final month of the season, they are hoping to avoid last place in their division.

“It makes him a little sad thinking about it now,” Fujiwara said with a smile.

Still, the Mets at least were genuine about their plans, as evidenced by a record-setting payroll. Those who attended distinctly recall Eppler stating in a compelling way how Cohen viewed turning the Mets into a consistent winner as something like a civic duty. For the Mets, authenticity was a theme of the meeting.

Eppler, Showalter and Hefner hadn’t sat together for a recruiting meeting before Senga. In preparation, Eppler instructed his officials to be as authentic as possible, be candid about expectations and approach the situation as a marriage or partnership.

They wanted to paint a clear picture of what they thought of Senga as a pitcher and what he might look like in the U.S. Eppler and Showalter sat in the room while Hefner and director of pitching development Eric Jagers appeared on video on large screens. The Mets had just hired Jagers away from the Cincinnati Reds and the team thought it was important for him to be present. So, he appeared from Philadelphia. Together, they touted the organization, explained how he’d be used, and how often he would pitch. They talked about giving him resources to help him acclimate off the field. Often, Eppler leaned into his experience.

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At one point during the meeting, Eppler said, “I try to identify players that can understand the difference between good process and good luck.”

The message resonated with Senga.

“I remember how smart he was,” Senga said. “Anytime I had a question in mind, he would already be answering it while the question popped up in my head. Anything I was wondering, he was already on it. He was already presenting that. How smooth and smart the presentation was what I remember.”

Among Senga’s questions: What did Eppler think was needed in order for the Mets to be a winning team? And what were the Mets planning for Senga on a personal level so that he could grow and improve? On top of all that, Senga wanted to know how they were going to accommodate him in terms of coming to a new country, the food culture, the language barrier and more.

Clearly, the Mets failed to fulfill the winning part of what they were selling. But they delivered on all their individual promises.

By everyone’s account, Eppler made an excellent, buttoned-up presentation. He did most of the talking. And when he spoke, he looked directly at Senga. He stressed that the Mets couldn’t control everything like pitching in different time zones for the first time and traveling far more often, but that they could control some things, like how often he pitched. In a thorough way, attendees said, Eppler demonstrated a deep understanding of what’s important to a player from Japan both on a cultural level and in regards to baseball.

“We had an advantage with Billy,” Showalter said. “Billy’s got quite an understanding, experience, and knowledge of Japan. He’s scouted a lot, with the Yankees and with Ohtani. He’s very well-respected over there and he knows the lay of the land. We had an advantage with Billy’s knowledge of what to do, what not to do, how to evaluate what might be a problem and what wouldn’t be. That helped us get ahead of a lot of things.”

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When it came to pitching specifics, Eppler had Hefner and Jagers walk things through. Jagers had experience working with Senga and working at Driveline. And Senga, as a free agent, had already visited Driveline in Washington in an effort to get better acclimated to the different baseball and work on different pitches. Hefner and Jagers showed movement and zone charts of Senga’s pitches compared to successful major leaguers, telling him what they’d plan on enhancing or changing. For example, they recommended higher usage of the splitter and encouraged Senga to throw his fastball higher in the zone. Within their messaging, they wanted to signal they liked Senga’s creativity and didn’t want to take that away from him, but wanted to express what they believed could unlock sustainable success. Really, they wanted to convey that they had conviction with what they were saying.

The meeting lasted more than three hours. Eppler remembers simply packing up his iPad when the meeting ended and cordially thanking Senga for the time. When the room cleared, Showalter pulled out a scouting term for someone with good body language and said something along the lines of, “Good face.” Afterward, Senga and his team quickly noted that the Mets would be among his top three finalists.

After the meeting, Eppler spoke a number of times with either Wolfe, someone else from Wasserman or Senga via FaceTime. They stayed in regular contact. In Senga, the Mets saw someone who ground his way through Japan’s rigorous developmental league to become somebody. “He’s a New Yorker,” a Mets official said at the time. Eventually, Senga told them so himself.

At 11 p.m. on Dec. 10, a Saturday, one of Senga’s agents texted Eppler, “Could you do FaceTime?” When Eppler answered the incoming call, Senga appeared from Japan and said, “Let’s go Mets.”

The parties had agreed to a $75 million, five-year contract.

“In a very good way, this guy has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder and he’s not afraid of a grind,” Eppler said. “I thought he really spoke to our community and our fan base as someone not afraid of a fight, not afraid to go, not afraid to prove himself.”

(Top photo of Kodai Senga: Wendell Cruz / USA Today)