Michael King was fine. Well not fine, but the 7.76 ERA he was sporting as a rookie in 2020 wasn’t that bad if you looked at the peripherals.
For one, his batting average on balls in play was bloated. So was his homer-to-flyball ratio, so much so that his expected ERA was several rungs below the actual number.
So he was fine, the Yankees told him.
But …
“I can’t just sit there and hope that luck turns back for me,” King recalled. “I’ve got to do something different.”
King’s experience was top of mind this spring, when he watched Padres pitcher Stephen Kolek throw his first live batting practice from behind the mound at the Peoria Sports Complex.
A soft-hit ball off the bat of Luis Arraez — surprise, surprise — landed safely. A hard-hit grounder from Manny Machado found a hole. The end result that afternoon was fine, but King couldn’t help but see a little bit of himself in the way Kolek’s east-west arsenal worked. So he offered a bit of a cheat code as he ed the fellow converted reliever on the walk back to the clubhouse that afternoon.
“We have like the exact same arsenal and it took me a while,” King said. “He has the stuff, but I felt like he needed to learn how to pitch with the stuff. Where I didn’t have the stuff and I learned how to pitch. Once I started adding the stuff, that’s when I could actually get through a lineup and face both righties and lefties, induce soft when I needed to and get strikeouts when I needed to.
“I think his main thing that he needed to figure out was sequencing, because he would get soft-ed to death.”
The conversation was a big step in Kolek’s evolution as a starter — one that will come full circle on Friday, when he steps onto the mound at Petco Park.
Yes, it was the visiting Mariners who paid $1 to swipe him from the Dodgers. It was the Mariners who ultimately moved Kolek out from a logjam of starting pitching talent and into the bullpen. It was the Mariners who left Kolek unprotected from the Rule 5 draft in December 2023.
And it will be the Mariners who will face a Kolek, again a starter, on Friday night.
The 28-year-old right-hander won the first big-league start of his career earlier this month in Pittsburgh, then followed it up with a historic complete game in a 21-0 win on Saturday at Coors Field.
Kolek no longer resembles the pitcher the Mariners let walk out the door.
“I feel like I’m not even recognizable, even from last spring training,” Kolek said.
“Just everything. My arsenal is way more developed now and my pitch ability to a lot of hitters is just far beyond what it was. I’m that much more confident and have a better understanding of what is required of you at this level and what goes with that.”
Kolek was clearly referencing the routines and prep work that line up a pitcher for his start day. He could have also been thinking about the number of directions he’s been pulled since returning to Petco Park on Monday with 14⅓ shutout innings to start his stay in the rotation.
A year ago, requests were few and far between for Kolek, a reliever with a 5.21 ERA and a last-resort arm who ironically would have been the guy the Padres would have asked to eat every inning possible in a 21-0 win to save the team’s more, well, important arms.
With a changeup and sinker with more than 15 inches of arm-side run and a sweeper with more than 16 inches of glove-side break — the sort of east-west movement that’s made King’s move into the rotation so seamless — it was easy to see what the pro scouting department was dreaming on when the Padres opted to try to keep Kolek on a contending roster.
But Kolek took his lumps. The difficult lessons were compounded, too, by precisely the same things that dogged King as a rookie. Kolek’s .359 batting average on balls in play not only trumped what King endured (.325), it was the seventh-highest among pitchers with at least 40 innings last year.
But Kolek waded through his rookie season with six pitches that attacked different quadrants of the strike zone at varying speeds, the makings of an arm who could “disrupt timing,” as pitching coach Ruben Niebla explained in spring training. The team had already lost Joe Musgrove for the year to Tommy John surgery, but the native San Diegan’s preseason “Camp 44” summit was a fitting time to begin to lay out plans to see if they could develop Kolek into a depth option.
Kolek’s spring training huddle with King changed the way Kolek — a two-pitch starter when the Mariners moved him into the bullpen — thought about sequencing and reading hitters’ swings.
A hitter is already timed for a changeup if he was late on the previous fastball. If a hitter offers at a front-hip pitch, you might be able to exploit him on the outer edge. What that swing tells you about this. And what this take tells you about that.
The point of it all?
Soft is great early in counts, but when you get two strikes, why leave anything to chance?
“We need a strikeout,” King said.
The messenger mattered as much as the message.
“My arsenal and Mike’s are a lot more similar. So it’s much more relatable when we’re talking about how to sequence and all that stuff,” Kolek said. “So definitely (it’s) ears open and mouth shut whenever he’s telling me how to do that. I try and learn as much as I can from him and watch whenever he’s pitching.”
The crash course was especially beneficial when the Padres sent Kolek to Triple-A El Paso with a specific to-do list:
Cement your routines and preparation. Throw more changeups. Challenge hitters inside.
His sweeper wasn’t all that consistent with El Paso, so Kolek took it upon himself to develop a curveball that he’s yet to unveil in the majors as a seventh weapon to go along with three fastballs (four-seam, sinker, cutter), a sweeper, a slider and a change-up that he’s doubled the usage of this year.
None of this is to minimize the game-planning that occurs with Niebla, bullpen coach Ben Fritz and catchers Elias Díaz and Martín Maldonado, but there’s conviction emerging from the seed that King helped plant in spring training.
“Especially in Colorado,” Kolek said. “Díaz and I were on the same page. I never called a single pitch or even shook him off on a single pitch. He called everything. But everything that he called, I was already thinking in my head, ‘this would be a great pitch to call,’ and he went ahead and called it.
“We were really clicking on the same page, and it turned out to be a great game.”
One for the ages, really.
A nine-inning shutout in a 21-0 win was tied for the largest margin of victory in a pitcher’s individual shutout since 1900.
The Padres needed him to do it because the Rockies, in the thin, dry air of Colorado, torched the bullpen the day before. The long innings from the Padres’ offense only complicated matters for Kolek. Coors Field remains the best hitting environment in the majors, and vibes just change when the opposing team sends a position player to the mound — as the Rockies did for the final two innings.
“That Colorado game was the most impressive because he had 20-plus minutes in between innings and stayed locked in,” King said. “Obviously, you want to continue to put up zeros, but if you’ve got a 15-run lead, you’re going to pitch differently. The defense is going play differently. There’s so many different things that go on. So I think his mentality was the best part for.”
The Rockies game is behind Kolek. He’s more interested in what’s next.
Not because he’s facing the Mariners either.
“They treated me well,” he said. He remains friends with George Kirby, Bryce Miller, Bryan Woo and Emerson Hancock, four starting pitchers whose development may have prompted Kolek’s move to the bullpen.
Now that he’s back in the rotation, Kolek believes he’s only beginning to tap into his potential.
“I’m feeling pretty confident on the mound right now,” Kolek said. “But I’m not going to get ahead of myself and just think I can bully anyone there. We’re going to keep doing the same process we’ve been doing and just try and keep the momentum we have.”
