The Angels are in a rough place. With Mike Trout injured, Shohei Ohtani departed, and pitchers like Patrick Sandoval and Reid Detmers injured or struggling, it’s no surprise that they’re on pace for another 90-loss season despite a recent six-game winning streak.
Their main source of their woes has been their long-struggling pitching staff, which this year has the third-worst ERA and walk rate in the majors. And while the Angels have taken extreme measures to add pitching depth to their farm system, the next generation of young pitchers in Anaheim aren’t exactly aces. This is to say that any short-term improvements to the staff will have to come from improvements to hurlers already on the big league roster.
This year, they’re attempting to do just that by embracing the newest pitch to come into vogue: the splinker. The splinker is still pretty new in the timeline of pitch design; its early adopters include Jhoan Duran and Paul Skenes. This sinker-splitter hybrid is difficult to classify because so few pitchers throw it, but such offerings generally sit in the same velocity band as four-seam fastballs while killing spin and lift in a manner similar to splitters and changeups. The end result can be downright nasty: Skenes has accumulated a +10 run value with his splinker across just nine starts, only a couple runs better than the first Angel to pick up the pitch, José Soriano.
Soriano’s journey to a major league rotation has been a wild one. As a teenager, he rose through the minors as an erratic flamethrower. Then, in 2020, the Pirates selected him in the Rule 5 draft, only to return him to the Angels in November of 2021 after he underwent Tommy John surgery twice in consecutive years. Despite pitching just 16 2/3 innings from 2020-22 across three levels of the minor leagues, none above Double-A, Soriano spent most of ’23 with the Angels as a middle reliever. He lived up to his reputation as a prospect, using his 99 mph fastball and lethal curve to strike out a dozen batters per nine innings. But he also walked five per nine, and his control issues put a hard ceiling on his role.
Soriano’s history with elbow injuries as well as a profile that played up in single-inning bursts out of the bullpen made it unlikely that he would ever be transitioned back to the rotation, yet that’s what the Angels decided to do with him in April. Now forced to stretch out to face the order multiple times, Soriano needed a pitch that could generate outs in the strike zone. His knuckle curve, which he threw a plurality of the time as a reliever, often missed well above or below the zone, while his four-seam fastball was knocked around to the tune of a .565 xSLG. In came the splinker. Last year, Soriano played with both a sinker and splitter, but his splinker is a new, distinct offering. He’s added two inches of drop, making it behave more like an offspeed pitch than a fastball, even as it sits at 98 mph, just one tick slower than his four-seamer. He’s kept the more traditional splitter in his arsenal, too, but has slowed it down a bit and now only features it against lefties.
Soriano’s reworked splinker is one of the most incomparable pitches in baseball, as even the most physics-defying sinkers fail to reach the same numbers in both velocity and drop. Centering his arsenal around the splinker has completely transformed Soriano’s batted ball profile. In his bullpen days, he relied heavily on whiffs, often losing hitters if they didn’t chase his curveball outside the zone. This year, he’s increased his groundball rate by 9.1 points, trailing only Framber Valdez and Cristopher Sánchez among starters with at least 70 innings. The splinker has been the primary contributor to this increase, sporting by far the highest groundball rate in his arsenal. Even more, he ranks second in line drive avoidance, completely neutralizing the quality of contact against him.
