Padres' Michael King survives while working to get that sinking feeling

PHILADELPHIA - When Michael King takes the mound Friday night against the Mets, he won't be trying to be better. He will be trying to win.

If the mechanical fixes he has been working on have taken hold, his sinker will go where he wants it, and batters will have something more to think about and King might make it look easy getting through seven or eight innings.

If not, he will lean on his changeup again, mix in whatever else is working well enough and get back to work in a couple days.

"I feel like if you gave me a couple weeks, three weeks, whatever it is, to harp on this and think mechanics while I’m out there pitching, I’d have bad numbers out there, but it would only last that long," King said. "I hate thinking mechanically. I want to go out there and compete and put up zeros."

So King works between starts trying to get right with his release point and the intricacies of his complex crossover delivery. And then in a game, he just does what works.

"If I’m thinking mechanics, I’m getting rocked," he said. "So I have kind of committed to, like, I’m just gonna compete."

King has been awfully good for a guy who hasn't been able to throw his best pitch where he wants to virtually all season.

The right-hander has gone at least five innings in all but one of his 12 starts and allowed no more than one run in half his starts. He enters Friday's game with a 3.18 ERA, a number that swelled almost half a point when he surrendered five runs in his last start.

That outing Sunday against the Nationals showed the magnificence and the limitations of what King is doing this season while unable to command his sinker.

Through five innings, he had allowed a single and a solo home run and thrown just 47 pitches. A left-handed-heavy Nationals lineup just kept beating his changeup into the ground.

In the sixth inning, they started to see the pitch better. He escaped without allowing a run but surrendered a pair of singles on changeups in the sixth inning.

Then CJ Abrams lined the first pitch of the seventh - a changeup - to center field. King went away from the changeup, got burned by an unfortunate fielder's choice that didn't produce an out, walked a batter to load the bases and then had his sinker run in and hit a batter to bring in a run and end King's day. All three runners on base when Bradgley Rodriguez took over ended up scoring.

Sunday was the third time this season he has gotten into the seventh inning having allowed two or fewer runs and then allowed multiple runs without recording an out.

Using his changeup more than his sinker for the first time, King has limited opponents to a .203 batting average (sixth lowest among qualifying National League starters) and kept most of his other numbers at about the same level as his career norms.

But he is having to work too hard at times, and opponents have eventually figured him out.

"I’ve always been able to keep a hitter honest by executing front-hip sinkers, and I think I only did maybe one against the Nationals," he said. "And that’s been a pitch that I’ve always been able to lean on, and I think there still might have only been one game this year that I’ve actually had consistently that pitch."

So what is the problem?

King's mechanics got askew last season when he developed a bone bruise in his left knee building up during his comeback from a nearly three-month layoff caused by inflammation in the long thoracic nerve near his throwing shoulder.Had it been earlier in the season, King would have stayed sidelined another four to six weeks to let the knee heal. Instead, King returned to pitch in September. To do so, he altered his mechanics just to be able to pitch and limit the pain he felt in his knee every time he threw the ball.

"All of August, September, October last year, and then this whole offseason, because I wasn’t fully thinking about - I just felt healthy - it’s not like I was trying to change anything," King said. "And I didn’t realize that I was ingraining these bad habits, so I came into spring training and needed to fix a lot of things."

And he needed to get ready for the season.

So it has been a slow go while he prepared to pitch and then had to go about getting out major league hitters every five or six days.

The sinker has yielded a .222 average, up from .209 last season and .200 in 2024.

More than anything, hitters know he can't reliably put it where he wants, having it dart into the zone in a way few pitches do. So he can't use it as often to get strikeouts and get out of trouble.

King does sound increasingly encouraged when discussing the pitch.

"We’ve definitely made progress on it mechanically, because I’m at least getting it to locations that I’m happy with, in terms of the misses," he said. "They’ll stay elevated, they’ll stay in. I was throwing a ton that I was trying to go in on, and I’d either yank it and almost hit the guy, or I’d try to execute that up and in, and it would be down and away. And I’m like, ‘What is going on?' So I’m missing in the correct areas, but it’s still not something that a hitter needs to respect, because it’s not a strike. It’s probably a strike 10% of the time when I’m trying to go there."

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This story was originally published June 4, 2026 at 7:02 PM.