Michael King’s Complete Game Shutout Revealed a New Level of Efficiency

On Sunday, coming off two consecutive shutouts, the San Diego Padres sent their de facto ace to the mound aiming for a sweep of their division rivals. And while the assumption should have been that they'd complete the sweep with Michael King on the mound, his three previous starts had been laborious enough to wonder exactly what it'd look like. 

On Opening Day against Atlanta, King made it through 76 pitches in 2 2/3 innings, allowing four hits and four walks that led to three earned runs. He followed that up with a 5 2/3-innings, three-earned-run start against the Athletics (101 pitches) and a clean five innings against Cleveland (88 pitches). That's 13 1/3 innings of work that featured 265 pitches. In other words, King has averaged a shade over 20 pitches per inning this year. 

It's not as if he was running up high strikeout numbers in all three starts, either. He did strike out 11 against the A's, but combined for just five in the other two starts against seven walks (six of them in the bookending starts prior to Sunday). Not that it had a negative bearing on the outcome; the Padres won all three starts. But there was a clear efficiency issue holding King back from working deeper into games. 

Efficiency turned out to not be an issue for King on Sunday, however. He went the distance, finishing with 110 pitches across nine innings. King surrendered just two hits and one walk, striking out eight in the outing. Had he been able to work faster in the ninth, he could've been in line for a Maddux. While a complete game shutout is a rarity in today's game structure — and thus worthy of merit on its own — the efficiency is the most important element out of all of this. And that starts with strike one.

Prior to Sunday, King's first strike rate this year was down almost 10 percentage points. He'd been at 66.1% a year ago; it was only 56.5% through his first three starts this year. That's not only down from his first season in San Diego, but down about eight percentage points from his career mark (64.8%). The worst of the bunch came against Cleveland, when he found the zone on the first pitch only 47.4% of the time. Not an issue on Sunday. 

Against the Rox, King came in at 69.0%, and for the first time this season, King was on his four-seam to open up counts: 

King was able to get ahead with the four-seam and then move to the changeup in 0-1 counts. Being deliberate with those two pitches allowed him to be more free in deploying the sinker in different contexts and to mix in the sweeper occasionally. Given how much we've seen him struggle with efficiency, the work early in counts proved to be much more ideal in this outing than the others.

That leads us to the other encouraging component: the usage. Back on April 7th, Davy Andrews wrote on King's evolving pitch shapes. The oversimplified version of the piece is that a change in arm angle is in the process of changing the shape and quality of his pitches. The four-seam and changeup are beneficiaries of this; the sweeper less so. King's three most-used pitches on Sunday? Four-seam (26%), changeup (26%), and sinker (23%). 

The sweeper came in at 18%. We hadn't seen the pitch take a clear backseat through any of King's first three starts. This stands as an encouraging sign. Not that we're advocating for King abandoning the pitch altogether. That he was able to generate whiffs on it 44 percent of the time would indicate that there's an efficient strategy to be deployed here: use the other offerings to fill in and around the zone before knocking them over with the sweeper. 

Ultimately, King's game is still evolving. That evolution likely includes usage issues — and likely sacrificing some efficiency — as pitches take shape early in the season. But Sunday was a positive step forward, regardless of opponent. The arsenal is gaining more clarity, and if there's one thing opposing hitters don't want, that's probably it.