PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. — Kodai Senga doesn’t quite know who started calling his forkball a “ghost fork” but he knows he heard the term about a decade ago. His signature pitch isn’t technically a splitter because he doesn’t fully grip it between two fingers, so he prefers to call it a forkball himself, but said fans can call it whatever they want.
The pitch itself has become the subject of baseball lore.
“I was throwing the forkball and the batters would say, ‘It disappeared! It disappeared,’” the former Nippon Professional Baseball League star said through a translator Sunday after the Mets wrapped up a spring training workout. “I just kind of heard it third person.”
