With the World Baseball Classic a little more than a month away, a lot of attention at Port St. Lucie will be on who isn’t at Mets spring training compared to who is once the tournament begins. One player who will be there, at least for right now, is new right-handed pitcher Kodai Senga.

Team Japan released its 30-man preliminary roster for the WBC in late January and Senga was not on the list. The official rosters for all the WBC teams will be announced on February 9 on MLB Network.

Now, that does not mean it is a definite that Senga can’t pitch later in the tournament, but all-in-all, this is a good thing for the Mets that he will be at the majority of spring training at the very least.

Senga has already pitched in the WBC for Japan, and he was dominant back in 2017. In four appearances (one start) he had 16 strikeouts and one walk in 11 innings of work with an ERA of 0.82.

With Senga at spring training, it gives him more time to work with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner and allows him more time to establish chemistry with catchers Tomás Nido and Francisco Álvarez while Omar Narváez is likely to be at the WBC with Venezuela, though not official. In addition, it allows the organization to control his workload early in the spring with less stress pitches happening as opposed to tournament competition.

Of course, this also comes after Jon Heyman reported in the New York Post that the medical reports on Senga were iffy as the team went through with signing him. While Heyman reports the Mets are confident he will be healthy this year, it is probably best to be conservative with how the organization handles him early in spring. The team was worried enough to work an option for a sixth year into his deal, which the team can exercise if he does not opt out after three years (he can if he throws 400 innings) and spends more than 130 days on the injured list with an elbow injury–like Tommy John.

Every player’s situation is different on whether or not they should be participating in the WBC, and if someone wants to represent their country when they can’t during the Olympics, it should be encouraged. Especially because this event can bring a lot of eyes toward baseball at a time when March Madness tends to dominate the headlines.

However, while Senga is only the projected third or fourth starter in a vaunted Mets rotation, his contributions can end up being pivotal as the season goes on and he gets adjusted to pitching in the majors. Right now, if you look at Senga’s projections for this year, courtesy of ZIPS on FanGraphs, he is projected for 142 strikeouts in 140.2 innings and an ERA of 3.46. The Mets would take that, but it’s tough to set expectations for Senga in the first year of his five-year, $75 million deal with at least some pressure on him to succeed right away.

There is the same amount of risk of being hurt in a World Baseball Classic game as there is in a spring training outing or a bullpen session on a back field. With that being said, due to the recent report on the medicals and wanting to see what Senga can do in his first year in the states, it might be best that the right-hander is with the Mets for the duration of spring training.