Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports
When Michael King’s season got off to a slow start, it was pretty easy to find the things that were going wrong. The walks, the homers, the short outings: I wouldn’t blame an analyst for doubting him. Oh, wait, that was me doubting King? Well that’s awkward, because he’s been exceptional ever since. But for someone with King’s profile – a kitchen-sink arsenal without a clear standout pitch and a history of working in relief – disaster never feels far off. So today I thought I’d highlight all the stuff that hasn’t gone wrong, because seeing King pitch is a good reminder that sometimes life is all about minimizing your weaknesses.
The first thing that could have gone wrong was decreased fastball velocity. King averaged 95.1 mph on his four-seamer in starts last year, but he was down around 93 mph through a month of play this season. He’s sitting 94 mph since the start of June, though, and his results on that pitch have improved markedly. He’s doing the same thing with his sinker: adding velocity and getting better results. To be fair, the results have been much better on his sinker than his four-seamer, but in both cases, they’ve improved quite a bit since the beginning of the year, and the improvement is the key here.
Pitching off of those two fastballs is particularly important for King, because he struggled mightily with falling behind in the count earlier this year. That led to a predictable dance. King would attack the zone with fastballs to get back into the count, and he’d sometimes fly too close to the sun. Given that his four-seamer is still crushable and he doesn’t consistently locate his sinker for strikes, he was getting himself into a lot of trouble and spending too much effort digging out of holes. The solution to that is to fall behind in the count less frequently, and that’s just what King has done. He’s attacking the zone a little more and drawing a few more swings, and the combination is getting him into favorable counts a little bit more often. Every little bit adds up, and King is now getting ahead in the count more than he did in his excellent 2023 season.
Of course, what you do when you get ahead is important too. When King gets ahead, everything starts to work better. His changeup is probably his best pitch, and it’s best used when batters are on the defensive. When he’s ahead in the count, there are a lot of at-bats that look like this: If you’re trying to defend the strike zone, that kind of movement is lethal. That’s still King’s bread and butter; he throws his changeup more than any other pitch with two strikes. But he can also use it as a get-me-over pitch when he’s behind in the count, and doing that consistently has turned his walk problem around. He’s been better than average when it comes to issuing walks since his disastrous first month. When he’s behind in the count, he paints the outside corner: When he gets to two strikes, he expands the zone: There’s nothing tricky about that, but look at those locations! Pretty much perfection. And when he’s locating the changeup that well, everything else in his game works better.
When he throws two-strike sinkers, batters are tying themselves in confused knots. Since his sinker and changeup fly on broadly similar planes, holding back from over-swinging at the changeup means taking called strikeouts on sinkers. A whopping 18.5% of the two-strike sinkers King throws go for called strikeouts. That’s eighth in baseball behind a number of elite pitchers and guys who use a sinker sparingly for the element of surprise. King’s doing it all the time; no one who throws as many sinkers as he does gets called strikeouts with them so effectively. That sinker/changeup dance with two strikes has helped key King’s turnaround. Of his 177 strikeouts, 104 have come from one of those two pitches, which is impressive given that he only throws them around half the time. His four-seamer just isn’t the kind of pitch that ends at-bats; he relies on one of these two to finish the job.
King has also made a separate change this year that I think ties the whole pitch mix together. He used to pitch to the extreme horizontal ends of the spectrum; his sinker and changeup each break nearly a foot to his arm side, while his sweeping slider moves nearly as much in the complete opposite direction. I feel like I write about this concept a lot, but that can make a hitter’s job easier. If the batter knows that King’s two pitches break two feet in opposite directions, and they also know that home plate is less than two feet wide, identifying a pitch early means they can confidently figure out if it’s going to be a strike or not. That gap kept King’s sweeper from playing as well as you’d expect from the numbers.
The changeup and sinker are always going to be effective because of their resemblance to each other, but when a pitcher only throws one breaking pitch and it moves far differently than everything else, that pitch gets hung out to dry. King’s solution was elegant and obvious: add something in the middle. A lot of pitchers add cutters to do this, and that’s basically what King has done, though his new breaking ball is more of a slider than a cutter. It’s pretty close to being a pure gyro ball; it doesn’t generate much horizontal or vertical movement, which means it slides in roughly halfway between his changeup and his sweeper. Our pitch plot tool has the sweeper and slider in the same color, but the cluster of breaking balls with less horizontal movement is pretty easy to see: I don’t have a great way of proving this, but it’s my opinion that the slider makes all of King’s other pitches better despite lackluster results on its own. Now that he’s throwing a breaking ball that frequently ends up in the strike zone, batters think “swing” more frequently when they see something bendy from him. That’s bad news for the slider, because it doesn’t have a ton of movement, but it’s great news for the sweep-ier version. His chase rate on the pitch has gone up, particularly when he’s ahead in the count. That’s good news, but it’s not enough. The key for King isn’t closing out after getting to two strikes, it’s getting there in the first place. He relies on winning from ahead in the count as much as any pitcher. His raw stuff isn’t overwhelming; none of his pitches have an outlier shape or a phenomenal combination of velocity and movement. He can’t fire get-out-of-jail-free fastballs at the top of the zone when he can’t figure out how to attack a batter. In a nutshell, that’s why King was struggling so much early in the year and why he’s recovered strongly since then. Early on, he wasn’t getting into two-strike counts very often, and even though he’s very efficient at closing out from there, that wasn’t enough to make everything work. Another heatmap will help make the point.
Here are his early season fastball locations when he fell behind in the count: Here they are since May 1: He’s throwing the ball in the strike zone more frequently, but over the dead center of the plate less often. He’s clipping the corners more. That combination is getting him back into the thick of things more often, and he continues to be excellent when it comes to converting two-strike counts into strikeouts.
There’s one other thing that King has consistently done well: limit home runs. That’s what went so disastrously wrong in April; he gave up 10 homers in his first seven appearances, as compared to only six in the 20 since then. I think that’s linked to both his ability to locate his fastball when behind and the extra pitch he’s added to blend things a bit more. He’s throwing fewer meatballs as…
