Raise your hand if you noticed how good Michael Soroka had been out of the bullpen prior to the Dodgers series.
Lower those hands, you liars!
Moving from the starting rotation in early May to a bullpen role where the White Sox specifically wanted to keep him stretched out meant that Soroka was often relegated to assignments like pitching the final three or four innings of a blowout loss. Fans and even beat writers are disinclined to notice when an 8-0 game in the fifth winds up being an 8-2 final score.
To make Soroka's 2.96 ERA in relief more surprising, the few times he slipped into medium leverage were some of his worst outings of the season. He played prominent roles in blown leads in Milwaukee and at Wrigley Field. It was there Soroka displayed that while his velocity had ticked back up to the mid-90s he was openly longing for, it was counterbalanced by uncharacteristically poor control, and in whole he's walked an untenable 14.8 percent of hitters out of the pen, and hit two others with pitches.
"Earlier this year there had been games where I threw fairly well and just didn't get away with much," Soroka said. "There are things I did get away with the other night, but made up for it, made some good finishing pitches and racked them up a little bit. It was fun."
Finishing pitches is the crucial thing. After seemingly lacking the weapons to finish off hitters out of the rotation (12.4 percent strikeout rate), Soroka is a strikeout machine (38 percent) out of the pen, having refined a slider that is so defined by its sharp vertical drop that his teammates seem unsure of what to call it.
"Since he started coming out of the bullpen it’s been a different Rok than I knew," said Garrett Crochet. "He’s got a great mentality about things and he’s been going in there and throwing ‘FU’ fastballs. The breaking ball has really taken a second gear and it’s been impressive to watch."
The traditional analysis would be that Soroka moved to the pen and saw a related velocity spike from it, and now he's been comfortably averaging 94 mph or above his last few outings. He can't dismiss that possibility out of hand, but felt this was the velocity band he reached last season and was always only posture and delivery adjustments away from reclaiming.
"A lot of it is moving quick and loose and stuff I've been trying to do for a long time and that kind of fell back into place," Soroka said. "If you are able to get ahead with a breaking ball and then the first fastball is 92-93 mph, but later in the count and he's battled off a couple of good sliders, and then you have 95 mph to go to, it's a different ballgame."
It's a seller's market for pitching and an eight-inning scoreless streak featuring 16 strikeouts could prick up some level of interest on its own. But even if the White Sox rotation wasn't likely to be strip-mined later this month, Soroka's long-term hope would be to return. The central question is whether this improvement has come via a style of pitching that can't translate to starting.
"Um, no," Soroka said. "I think that's been the best part."
Steven Wilson is inclined to agree that his eighth-inning appearance on Saturday, during which he landed sweepers for strikes on the edges en route to two strikeouts in a 1-2-3 inning, was arguably his best of the season. He doesn't buy an explanation that distance from the back injury that cost him almost a month is to be credited.
"The back was me slipping on a mound in New York," Wilson said. "It was kind of a one-off."
He views his progress, which has seen him hold a 3.60 ERA despite 17 walks in 25 innings, as a more linear path since the close of the offseason. Like most pitchers, Wilson spent the offseason throwing at a private facility looking for ways to get better, like a new splitter he toyed with throughout spring. But he found that the end result of his offseason changes weren't workable.
"I won't name any names: I went to a pitching facility, a pitching place, and I think it got my mechanics pretty out of whack from where they need to be," Wilson said. "Since honestly right before I got traded, we kind of identified where my mechanics were out of whack, and I was doing it basically wrong for six months, all offseason. And so this year has been just trying to get back to my old mechanics, and the mechanics that work."
The progress of getting back into sync has come in fits and starts. Wilson was throwing an effective changeup early in the year, but since a broken pinky from college never quite healed the same, feel for it can be fickle. More frequent spurts of 94-95 mph velocity have been encouraging, but Wilson expects to regularly see 96-97 mph in the second half when he's more consistent. An adjustment in grip to account for a higher arm slot for his sweeper has Wilson commanding it better of recent, and throwing it to hitters of both handedness again.
He's getting by and getting outs, but Wilson views this as something lesser than the pitcher he imagines he'll be in the second half.
"It's hard as a reliever, because you've got to be ready to pitch every day, or every other day," Wilson said. "You don't really have the luxury of throwing bullpens and working on these mechanics. You get X amount of throws before the game trying to fix them and then you get the in-game. And then working on things in-game isn't it. It'll be a process. It has been already. But going into the offseason and next year I know exactly where the mechanics need to be. I won't have to go through six months of doing the wrong shit again."
Has Chad Kuhl found something? It's probably too soon to say from a performance perspective. Anyone who holds a sub-5.00 ERA during sustained work at Triple-A Charlotte deserves praise, but his exciting 29.2 percent strikeout early in major league work is paired with a 14.6 percent walk rate that makes whiffs necessary.
But he's found something in terms of comfort by embracing a lower arm slot. Chasing rising four-seam movement, Kuhl felt himself reaching up toward a high three-quarter placement last season with Washington, as he yielded ugly results and was released by the end of June. With a White Sox org that been following the principle of embracing natural throwing motions, Kuhl has been using "a lot of reps" to return to his familiar lower release point.
From there, Kuhl feels he can execute both a sweeper and a traditional gyro slider with more fastball command, and has even worked on a cutter for stretches.
"It's just more natural for me," Kuhl said. "They all kind of come out of the same slot for me. Being able to do multiple things with it. That hard cutter really plays to lefties well. Having the gyro slider that plays to both and the sweeper I've been able to throw a ton to righties and having success."
