Kodai Senga is unlike any other MLB free-agent pitcher

Not every player who comes over from Japan’s NPB arrives with a parade of hype. Senga isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime Shohei Ohtani-type talent or even on the level of Yu Darvish when he arrived a decade ago, but there’s still a ton of reason to be excited. He’s coming off another excellent season — posting a 1.94 ERA with 156 strikeouts across 144 innings for the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks in NPB, the top league in Japan. Turning 30 in January, Senga is younger than every other starting pitcher available besides Zach Eflin, adding to his appeal for teams reluctant to commit big dollars to pitchers already nearing their mid-30’s. Though NPB is not MLB, his decade-long track record of excellence in what is widely considered the world’s second-best league has a huge group of teams targeting him as one of the most appealing players on the entire free agent market.

It’s easy to look at the tremendous statistics and dream big about Senga’s potential atop an MLB rotation, but there are many ways a pitcher can compile a sub-2 ERA. So how does he do it? What kind of pitcher is Senga?

The first thing to know is that, like many Japanese aces before him, Senga relies heavily on an incredible splitter to induce both whiffs and weak contact. Senga’s splitter in particular — which he threw about 20% of the time at an average of 85 MPH — is of the forkball variety and has been dubbed by the likes of Pitching Ninja as the “ghost fork.”