It did not quite rival the level of foreign media coverage present across the way at Dodgers camp this spring, but a handful of South Korea television crews did make it over to the White Sox side to check in on former KBO stalwart Chris Flexen and reigning KBO MVP Erick Fedde.
"I went over there with high hopes to come back," Fedde said of having a dream season on the other side of the world. "It feels good when all your hard work -- you make drastic changes and they are successful. It's a really satisfying feeling."
Some players have a way of rationalizing mid-career developments as happening when they were destined to happen, where all the struggles they endured before their eureka moment were somehow necessary. Fedde draws more direct, causal connections, and openly wishes he had remade himself into the pitcher that carried the NC Dinos to the KBO semifinals last season far sooner.
Fedde spent eight full seasons in the Nationals organization after being taken with the 18th overall pick, perfectly squeezed between where Carlos Rodón (third) and Michael Kopech (33rd) went in that draft. When the Nats put Fedde out of a job by non-tendering him after the 2022 season marred by an achy shoulder, that's when wholesale changes seemed necessary to seek out on his own. Fedde arrived at Push Performance in Scottsdale on the recommendation of former Nationals teammate Sean Doolittle. Once he was healthy, he sought out specific items he felt he was lacking; often from other clients.
Fedde talked to Shelby Miller about his sweeper, because he felt he lacked a swing-and-miss breaking ball to spring him out of tight situations. He spoke to Logan Webb about his changeup because he struggled to find any consistency for his own, which he needed badly against left-handers. The changes in both pitches reflect his new east-west approach, as each now tout more lateral movement than previous versions.
"The simple way of putting it is leaning into what I already did well, like forcing myself to not move my shoulder as much up and down, more east and west for that cleaner slot," Fedde said. "The biggest thing was embracing working through the ball instead of over the top of it. You hear a lot 'get over the ball,' and once I got to the thought of 'get through it,' and stopped making myself feel like I was throwing it [with my arm] high and getting more on the side, it created more natural comfort of going through the baseball."
For loyal Sox Machine readers (Machineheads?) who remember Brian Bannister talking about finding command and arsenal improvements by getting pitchers to embrace their natural plane of rotation, Fedde might sound like the finished version of the dish that gets pulled out of the oven when the cooking segment starts bumping up against the commercial break. But with the White Sox's emphasis on bolstering their infield defense, there's a more straightforward way to sell him as a value purchase, which led Fedde to note that there seem to be a lot of pitchers with similar arsenals to his own in camp.
"He had a 70 percent groundball rate [in the KBO]," said Ethan Katz. "Might that go [down] a little bit? Sure. But that’s a significant number. He’s able to get guys on the ground. That should lead to a lot of success with the defense we have behind him."
From scouts who have looked at his arm angle data from the KBO, Fedde's adjustment is less a dramatically measurable slot change, and more of a switch in arsenal and attack plan producing subtler mechanical byproducts. He felt his velocity return while working at Push, but the main velocity jump Fedde saw is in his slider, which became a sharper 80-85 mph sweeper as he embraced getting on the side of the ball on release. His altered split-changeup action has sharper arm side movement to mirror it. And while Fedde has a unenviable 9.5 percent career walk rate in the majors, he came up as a prospect with plus command that he rediscovered in the KBO by corralling the action on his two-seamer.
"I've always thrown a two-seam, whether it's been effective or not," Fedde said. "Now I just feel like it's so much more consistent. The hard thing with two-seams is if they're not consistent, it's hard to throw a lot of strikes with them. They're [supposed to be] moving, but if you try to throw it and it's not moving, you're starting it off the plate and it's a ball the whole time. Now I know where to start my pitches and where they're going to end."
Obviously we're eager to see if this looks as exciting as it's being described. But analyzing Fedde's spring debut from March 3 is a prospect so troubling that I feel the need to qualify every sentence. The extreme left field angle that the Angels broadcast used is probably the worst view to watch an east-west pitcher like Fedde, which is sort of impediment that's common to games from March 3. The 31-year-old was in trouble throughout his two innings of work, yielding a pair of solid hits and his only run of the day within his first few pitches in a White Sox uniform -- except not really, because it's March 3 and not a real game.
Fedde seemed to struggle to get inside enough to jam left-handed hitters Aaron Hicks and Nolan Schnauel, which hints at a potential long-term vulnerability for someone throwing a sinker with arm side movement, but it's only March 3 and Fedde told reporters postgame that it was a byproduct of a lack of feel for his cutter. In striking out three batters in two innings, Fedde flashed the out pitches he lacked in his 20s, and the way he got Mike Trout to wave helplessly at a sweeper would truly be exciting were it later than March 3 and both were close to full speed.
There are some reasons for timidity that league scouts offer reminders of here. Fedde had a spin rate jump with the tackier KBO ball that was helpful for his international conquest. While he also led the league in strikeout rate, his laterally-oriented, sinker-heavy attack was seemingly built to thrive in the more contact-oriented KBO game. How much Fedde will be able to live in the zone where the punishment for location mistakes are more severe is something he will spend this season proving to the league.
If it shakes to a back-end starter, it's a nice value for a humble two-year, $15 million investment and encourages the Sox to look to the Pacific Rim again to fill a rotation slot, rather than gamble on the type of damaged goods that same financial outlay would pull in stateside. If it shakes out to the relentless groundball machine Fedde was last year in South Korea, it's a more meaningful step toward the dream scenario for a dominant rotation for which Sox pitchers are spending the spring hyping themselves up.
Either way, it's something more compelling for Fedde to buy into than he's ever had before in this league.
"It's exciting to see a plan," Fedde said of the Sox staff rounding into shape. "There's a true goal."
