After Michael King’s first start in his first season as a full-time starting pitcher, his new pitching coach had some feedback.
“You sucked today,” Ruben Niebla told him.
That is, according to both men, exactly what was said as they sat on the bench in the Padres dugout at Petco Park late in the afternoon of March 31.
King had just lasted just four innings against the Giants while throwing 88 pitches, surrendering only a pair of hits and a pair of runs but walking seven batters.
“One of the things that I pride myself in is being able to treat everybody (based on) how I feel they’re gonna respond,” Niebla said. “So I think that with him at that moment, even though we didn’t have that relationship yet, I was like, ‘I’m gonna find out who he is right now by challenging him with this.’ And he responded well.”
In the moment, King was shocked but quickly agreed with Niebla. By the next day, he had feedback for some of the questions the coach had asked him to assess.
Exactly one week later, King held the Giants scoreless for seven innings while yielding four hits and walking one.
“He responded well,” Niebla said.
In the moment and in the grander sense.
What happened between that first and second start is indicative of the 29-year-old right-hander’s journey of discovery, trial, error and toil over the course of a season that can be considered nothing short of great success.
On Tuesday, King will make his 30th start for the Padres in the opener of a crucial three-game series against the Dodgers in Los Angeles.
He is no longer a guy in his first season as a starter. He is a bona fide starter. And he is one of the biggest reasons the Padres are in a position to have a chance to win the National League West and are almost undoubtedly headed to the postseason.
The fact King has already pitched 168⅔ innings is a story that has been told throughout the year.
The fact King arguably has been the Padres’ most valuable pitcher has been grossly underreported. King is 12-9 with a 3.04 ERA and 198 strikeouts through 29 starts.
King made 19 starts for the Yankees from 2020 to ’23. Nine of those came last season, eight of them at the end of the year. And he was only really let loose in the last four of those.
But the Padres, a team that gave Seth Lugo a chance to reinvent himself as a starter in 2023, was intent on King being a big part of their rotation this season.
He was the key piece for the Padres in the December trade that sent Juan Soto to the Yankees.
King arrived in spring training with a goal of pitching 180 innings. Niebla, whose open-mindedness and expertise were lauded by Lugo as he made the jump from 65 innings with the Mets in 2022 to 146⅓ for the Padres in ’23, figured somewhere around 150 was more likely.
For a few months this season — from about May through August, at least — there were questions from the media after every one of King’s starts about how he felt and how long his starting every four or five days would be sustainable.
He blew past his 2023 total of 104⅔ innings, his previous high, on July 4. Three starts later, he was past 120 innings. Two starts ago, he eclipsed the 161⅓ innings he threw in ’18 between three levels of the minor leagues.
This, it turns out, was just not a thing.
And it is no longer a question of whether King can do it. He has done it.
The Padres wholeheartedly believe they are past any question of whether he can pitch through the postseason, however long it lasts for them.
“He’s going the distance,” Niebla said.
The only question to ask now is how high will King finish in voting for the NL Cy Young award.
Consistency rules
In his 20 starts since May 22, King’s 2.44 ERA ranks fourth among all major league starters. His 2.53 FIP, a metric similar to ERA that negates the impact of fielding, ranks third in that span behind presumptive National League Cy Young winner Chris Sale and Pirates rookie phenom Paul Skenes and just ahead of presumptive AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal.
For the season, King ranks fourth in the NL in ERA (3.04), seventh in FIP (3.25), fifth in batting average allowed (.222) and fifth in strikeouts (198).
There can be virtually no argument that Dylan Cease has been the Padres’ best pitcher — when he is at his best.
Cease threw a no-hitter on July 25 against the Nationals and has gone at least six innings in which he allowed one hit and no runs in six other starts. That version of Cease can dominate any lineup, which is what makes him a potential tone-setter in a postseason series.
However, there have been almost as many starts in which Cease hasn’t given the Padres a real chance to win as those in which the opponent has no chance to win. Cease went 10 starts from mid-May to the beginning of July with a 6.15 ERA. And in five starts from Aug. 11 to Sept. 1, he posted a 4.78 ERA.
Conversely, there have been relatively few valleys to go with King’s peaks.
It should not go unnoticed that by having King start Tuesday, he is the one who would be available to go in Sunday’s regular-season finale in the event that game against the Diamondbacks is crucial to playoff positioning. That would leave Cease as the potential starter in Game 1 of a wild-card series two days later.
The Padres’ rotation has been, by most measures, the second-best in the major leagues behind only the Mets since Sept. 1. As they considered how they would line up their pitchers for the season’s final week, they felt pretty good about whatever they decided.
But if you had to choose …
“You’d argue that Michael is the guy,” Joe Musgrove said on Friday. “Michael has been the most consistent guy we’ve had.”
Learning curve
That was not the case early on.
King threw an April 6 gem in San Francisco, then took a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Brewers 11 days later and shut out the Dodgers on two hits over seven innings on May 10. But scattered around those starts were three in which he allowed six runs and another in which he allowed seven.
King had a 4.06 ERA through his first nine starts. Through 12 starts, he had allowed an MLB-high 13 home runs. At that point, too, his walk rate was higher than 10 percent.
A successful reliever for most of his first 115 appearances from 2019 through ‘23, King had the mentality needed to strand runners after sprinting from the bullpen. It worked against him when he was tasked with working the first six innings.
“As a reliever, every time I did homework, it was, ‘Where do I get swing and miss?’ Because that’s all I needed to get,” said King, who had a 2.63 ERA and stranded 75 percent of the runners he inherited as a reliever with the Yankees. “It didn’t matter if I had a a 25-pitch inning as long as I put up a zero. Or if I came in with runners on base, I knew I needed a punchout. I never looked at soft contact. I never looked at where to avoid the slug. And then that was where in April and May when I didn’t have my best stuff I was OK walking people, because I could strike guys out as well. And now it ended up being 100 pitches in four innings or five innings, and it was a tough go. So the biggest thing that I learned is looking for soft contact holes in opposing hitters.”
Over his last 18 starts, King has surrendered four home runs and has a 7.5 percent walk rate.
How he improved has been a combination of factors, not the least of which has been learning to trust a magnificent changeup more and to have conviction with his four other pitches when his dastardly sinker isn’t going where he wants.
Being a starter requires the ability to adjust and then adjust some more and, when things go sideways, to readjust the adjustment. It also requires an immense amount of work and concentration between starts.
When Niebla saw King responding to coaching and learning from mistakes, about two months into the season, he began to feel confident the Padres would make it through the whole season with King in the rotation.
“It was like, ‘OK, now he’s starting to think like a starter. Now he’s starting to think (about) what this takes,’” Niebla said. “And with that, he started transitioning his whole day around being a starter and every day — weight room, medical, all that. You started seeing he’s starting to captivate this. And you saw it in his preparation for games, as far as the attack plan is concerned, which is huge. As a reliever, you don’t need it. Go throw your best two pitches to some guys. As a starter, there’s an arsenal here. We’ve got to know who and what to do to that hitter and kind of go through the lineup. … You need to understand who you are and who your opponent is.”
Based on their scouting and research, the Padres felt King had the makeup and stuff to become a top-end starter. That is why they insisted he be part of the Soto trade. They felt even more strongly about it once they got to working with him.
King’s ability to evolve and grind through this transition has in some ways left Niebla in awe.
“God, there are so many attributes that he brings to the table that are, like, good qualities, not only as a competitor but as a person,” Niebla said. “Putting your finger on what that one thing is, it’s like so many things. He works hard, he’s smart, he’s nasty. … A lot of it has to do with him as a person, who he is as a person. He really is the caring, nurturing person that has this other side of them, one that when lights turn on, it’s like, ‘Wow! There’s this competitor over here.’”
In a recent conversation with Niebla, King assessed his season.
“I felt like I was not my true self in April and May,” King said. “I was learning a lot of things. I was giving up a lot of home runs. I was walking a lot of people. And I know that that just wasn’t me as a pitcher in general. And then things started to click. It wasn’t like there was one thing that I could go back to that made it click. But I then looked back at June, July-ish run where I felt like I had command of almost every one of my pitches. Every time I went out there, I felt like I was going six. I was giving the team a chance to win every outing. And I talked to Ruben about it, and I was like, ‘Wow, I just got on a stretch where I then was like a true starter.’ Instead of trying to find myself, trying to figure out what pitches are working that day, what pitches I need to go to, it was like, ‘I have my strengths, I know the hitter’s weaknesses, and I’m just going out there and give our team the best chance to win.’”
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