#21 Kodai Senga is disappointed in his stellar start

Plus: Old friend alert and old guy-we'd-rather-not-think-about alert

Where do you think you’ll be in 10 years? Hey, it’s Zach, and I don’t think I’ll be watching Rich Hill pitch, but I’ve learned not to be too sure.

Now 45 years young, Hill signed a minor-league deal with the Royals on Tuesday. We’re 20 years on from Hill’s major-league debut, but more impressively, 10 years on from his reemergence as a dominant, curveball-slinging novelty act. In September 2015, Hill surfaced with a bad Red Sox team, fresh off a stint with the Long Island Ducks, and chucked four almost unfathomably good starts.

He threw high fastballs and a shape-shifting curveball and very little else. He threw from enough angles to make the Vitruvian Man jealous. At the time, reasonable observers were obliged to caution that Hill was not likely to suddenly become a Cy Young contender at age 35. And, to be fair, he didn’t. But 909 major-league innings later, he has outlasted and outperformed that season’s AL Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel and runner-up David Price. On the leaderboard of innings beyond age 35, he’s still almost 20 frames ahead of Justin Verlander.

Accumulation, though, was never the goal; even becoming a flash in the pan was an accomplishment. The beauty of the Rich Hill story is that he kept finding creative, memorable ways to flash. He took a perfect game into the ninth but lost in heart-breaking fashion. He became an expert at the drag bunt.

More than anything else, he embodied possibility. He took then-new Statcast information that has, at times, threatened to make the game more homogenous and combined it with nothing-left-to-lose ingenuity.

If Hill actually plays for the Royals, he will tie Edwin Jackson’s all-time record by playing for his 14th different franchise. He has never made an All-Star team, never earned Cy Young votes and never won a World Series. But he has made every unlikely moment feel like it might just be the beginning.

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Kodai Senga has a 1.22 ERA. He thinks he’s pitching poorly

By Hannah Keyser

the many “ghost fork” bits on the broadcast and around the ballpark are excellent. My attempt to capture the ghostly “K” in a screengrab: less so.

Through eight starts, the Mets’ enigma of a maybe ace Kodai Senga has a 1.22 ERA, that’s good for second best among all qualified major league starters.

Through the same number of games in 2023 — his first season in the States after coming over from Japan, for which he finished second in Rookie of the Year voting — he had a 3.77 ERA.

And yet.

“Quite honestly, I don't feel like I'm very good at any point during the game this year,” he told me before his most recent start via interpreter Hiro Fujiwara.