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MLB Rumors: Kodai Senga’s ghost fork on fully display

Kodai Senga had the shortest start of his young big-league career on Friday night against the Oakland Athletics, a game the Mets won 17-6. Senga’s ghost forkball has made an appearance in every start, but Friday was unique in its own sense, as Mets fans traveled to Oakland to watch the Japanese sensation in person.

Mets fans who were in Oakland brought signs which featured a cartoon ghost. Yet, Athletics security took them down in between commercial breaks on the New York broadcast, and Gary Cohen of SNY took notice.

“They’re making them take the ghost signs down,” Cohen said. “Oh, come on guys. It’s only fun.”

Per the New York Post, “Senga’s glove depicts a ghost holding a trident-like fork on the outside of the webbing — in honor of his signature pitch — and his name and number are spelled “S3NG4” in orange and black on the side.” He plays into the brand.

FanGraphs broke down the ghost fork in a recent article about Senga, suggesting it was most like a splitter, but had its own unique spin:

"“Now, let’s summarize what we’ve learned about the ghost fork. The ghost fork is most similar to a splitter, but it’s also pretty distinct, especially in terms of mean-of-closest-five Euclidean distances. It’s also the most Senga-like because, well, Senga throws it. Not to mention, its closest comps include some really good pitches. Thus, I expect it to be successful going forward, though probably not to the tune of the 34.6% swinging strike rate it had in its debut — that’s absurd. But it could definitely hang out in the 20s. Mets fans: it’s been a difficult start to the season, but hopefully you can rest a little easier knowing that so far, the Senga experiment has been a rousing success.”"

It’s unclear what about the posters the Athletics had an issue with, but the Mets made them pay, scoring 17 runs in the process.