Thoughts on Kodai Senga and the ‘Double Hook’

In Friday night’s game, Kodai Senga issued back-to-back walks with two outs in the third inning, the second time in the game he walked two in the same frame. But from that point forward, here’s what Senga did:

F8
KL
3U
1B CF
FC 6U
L8
P5
Ks
F8
43
1B to 1B
63

After the second single, which was about as weak of a hit as you could imagine, the Mets rushed to get a reliever warming up and sent Jeremy Hefner to the mound to stall for time. Why is it a crisis if a starting pitcher who’s cruising lets up a soft hit? When David Robertson was in trouble in the eighth inning and then Adam Ottavino got in hot water in the ninth, no reliever was scurrying to get loose.

It’s a type of double standard that we should examine.

With the way the Mets’ starting pitchers have performed this season, perhaps we shouldn’t criticize any move to get them out of the game. There are times when pitchers just don’t have it and it’s prudent to get them out before things blow up. But the sixth inning for Senga was not that at all. He had retired six straight batters and then gives up a soft contact hit. It wasn’t the time to panic, even with a one-run lead and the team having lost nine of their last 11 games.

One of Buck Showalter’s strengths as a manager is the ability to think beyond just the current game. You see that with the way he handles his bullpen, bending over backwards not to pitch guys three times in four days, better known as the Terry Collins special. Yes, it happens. But nowhere near the frequency that it had the previous decade. It’s a big reason why the Mets’ bullpen has been so good the past two seasons under Showalter, compared to their 15th-place finish in ERA in Collins’ last season in 2017.

But if Showalter can think long-term with his relievers, shouldn’t he do the same thing with his starters? You can argue that he’s doing just that – trying to keep them healthy by removing them at the first shot of trouble. But my take is that this is doing the starters more harm than good.

The game is fundamentally different than it was just 10 years ago in terms of what’s expected from starters. But it’s fair to wonder how much of that is an inability of starters to go longer versus how much of that is because managers don’t want to even give them the chance. Starters not being able to go thru a batting order the third time has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My belief is that the best managers read and react in the moment instead of exclusively utilizing paint-by-number strategies. My overwhelming preference would be to look at how the starter, in this case Senga, was performing in the game, rather than what his pitch count was or what time thru the order it was.

Senga stayed in the game because they didn’t have a pitcher ready to replace him. And he got out of the inning with a harmless grounder. But his pitch count was 101 so it didn’t matter how well he was pitching – he was done for the night. Senga himself has said that in Japan he routinely threw 120 pitches. But while the Mets bend over backwards to keep Senga pitching with the extra rest he got in Japan, they don’t let him go to the same pitch count he’s used to in his home country.

This is probably the first time in his six starts that we wanted Senga to stay in longer than he did. Not every outing has to be 125 pitches. But when the starter is in control, 125 shouldn’t be a number to make us get sick. Instead, we get the 100-pitch boogeyman, the ultimate in paint-by-number managing.

Perhaps there’s help on the way.

Once again, the Atlantic League is utilizing what’s become known as the “Double Hook” rule. There are different ways this rule could be implemented but the version being used is that if the starting pitcher is removed before he pitches five innings, the team loses its designated hitter, too. It’s an attempt to reward teams for not pulling the pitcher early.

It’s tough to implement this rule in the minor leagues, where teams frequently have low pitch counts, especially with their high-dollar starters. But those prized pitching prospects are in affiliated ball, not the Independent Atlantic League. But generally, these rules are first tested in the Atlantic League, then move to the minors, before reaching MLB if everything works the way the league wants and expects.

The issue to me is that as well-intentioned as this rule may be, it creates as many problems as it solves. If the starter doesn’t have it and digs his team an early hole, they likely need their DH to mount a comeback. It’s one thing to be down three runs in the second inning. But if you have to leave a starter in the game who doesn’t have it, you run the risk of turning a three-run deficit to a six-run hole in the blink of an eye.

We need to have a rule like the “Double Hook” to keep starters pitching well in the game, not those that are getting hit hard. But it’s hard to initiate change in MLB, as it should be. And one of the things is that we need new rules to be easy to understand. The rule to ban the shift was much easier for fans to understand than the pitch clock rules. And the result is that the shifting rule has been implemented without any problems. The clock has been a different beast.

The five inning “Double Hook” rule as used in the Atlantic League is easy to understand. But we need it to be more complex to solve more problems than it creates. A relatively simple tweak might be to enforce the “Double Hook” whenever the pitcher is removed early in a game where the lead is two runs or fewer, regardless of which side of the score the pitcher’s team finds itself in. That would help in the case of a pitcher who didn’t have it. But it wouldn’t have helped Senga Friday night.

Does MLB have the stomach to turn something simple into something complex? And if it does, will fans embrace it?

Ultimately, that’s not an outcome for anyone to wager on in the affirmative. But that may not be the worst thing for MLB, either. My preference is for MLB to step in and create a rule change when the issue is outside of the player’s or team’s control. The pitch clock was a perfect example of this. Batters couldn’t make the pitchers throw the ball sooner and hurlers couldn’t stop the hitters from stepping out of the box after every pitch. The league needed to step in.

But taking out starters early is something that managers can change, if they have the guts to do so. My hope is that when the injured starters return and take a couple of turns in the rotation, that Showalter will be more aggressive with them, in terms of asking them to handle a bigger load. Instead of looking for reasons to take the starter out, that he looks for reasons to keep them in the game.

For sure, sometimes it’s the right idea to lift a starter early. But it’s not always the right idea. My opinion is that it wasn’t the right time with Senga Friday night. Perhaps that’s the first time all season one could make that claim, with how poorly all of the Mets’ starters have been.

Yet it won’t be the last.