King gives hitters that sinking feeling -- and all they can do is stop and stare

When Michael King knocks, he knows the hitter won't answer.

He's studied their habits like a burglar casing a house. And with his sinker, he's coming in -- through the front door or the back door. 

King has become a master at stealing strikes for the Padres, particularly third strikes. The sinker is his lockpick.

King has already gotten 16 called strikeouts with his sinker this season -- 11 front-door sinkers to freeze left-handed hitters, five backdoor sinkers to freeze righties. His sinker has produced more backwards K's than any pitch type in the Majors.

"Rarely am I throwing it glove-side and wanting a swing," King said. "So if I'm throwing it front-hip [to a lefty], I do not want a swing. That's me trying to get a freeze, where I'm locking him up."

Most called strikeouts on a single pitch type, 2025

• Michael King's sinker -- 16
• Zac Gallen's 4-seamer -- 14
• Brady Singer's sinker -- 13 
• Jordan Hicks' sinker -- 13 
• Ryan Pepiot's 4-seamer -- 13

Since he joined the Padres at the start of last season, King has racked up 56 of those punchouts with his sinker, tops among all MLB pitchers over that time. He gets those backwards K's because he understands the hitters he's facing, and he understands how to use his stuff against them. 

"As a putaway pitch, that's where it's strictly based off the hitter's reactions, and also two-strike approaches," King said. "There are certain guys that get super aggressive in two-strike counts, and I'll rarely use the sinker. … It's for guys that I know are patient, or guys that I've set up for something that starts as a ball and finishes as a strike."

King's sinker works as a "freeze" pitch because of its extreme horizontal movement. It’s averaging 19 inches of horizontal break this season, among the best in MLB. That makes it a pitch he can start far off the plate, but have it finish in the zone for an easy called strike, especially when you add in King's deceptive crossfire delivery. 

Sinkers with the most horizontal movement, 2025
Pitchers with 100+ sinkers thrown

• Luis Castillo -- 19.4 inches 
• Michael King -- 19.0 inches
• Emerson Hancock -- 18.9 inches 
• Huascar Brazobán -- 18.6 inches
• Sandy Alcantara -- 18.5 inches
• Dustin May -- 18.5 inches
• Landen Roupp -- 18.5 inches  

"Obviously, the sinker that I have is very horizontal," King said. "It still has depth. But I use it a lot as a ball-to-strike pitch. Very rarely am I trying to get a chase on a strike-to-ball pitch."

That makes King a different style of pitcher than most aces in the Majors today, who rack up their K's with overpowering fastballs that blow hitters away and wipeout breaking and offspeed pitches that gets hitters to chase. Not so with King. 

King's sinker has become his best strikeout pitch, even though it's his worst swing-and-miss pitch. 

In 2025, King has recorded 24 strikeouts with his sinker, easily more than his sweeper (15), changeup (13), four-seamer (nine) or slider (three). When he throws it with two strikes, he gets the strikeout 34% of the time, his best putaway rate of any pitch in his arsenal.

Yet his swing-and-miss rate on his sinker is just under 16%, basically half of what he generates with his other pitches, which all have whiff rates around 30%. 

That's only possible because of how good King is at freezing hitters. He doesn't rely on the swing-and-miss, or the chase. He puts hitters away by ringing them up, in the zone. Two-thirds of those sinker K's this season are looking, not swinging.   

King uses a very even pitch mix with two strikes, deploying a balanced three-pronged attack against both right-handed and left-handed hitters -- sweeper/sinker/four-seamer vs. righties, changeup/four-seamer/sinker vs. lefties -- while also mixing in a fourth pitch regularly to both sides (changeups to righties and sweepers to lefties). His sinker works flawlessly with the rest of his arsenal, because its movement is identical to his changeup, mirrors his sweeper and diverges from his four-seamer even though the two fastballs come in at basically the same velocity.

If the hitter doesn't know which one of four pitches to expect, and is deceived by the movement profile, he's way more likely to guess wrong and take one that ends up in the zone.

"I'd say the typical way of pitching is to go offspeed, strike-to-ball with two strikes and get the chase," King said. "I trust my offspeed pitches to get there, but I also trust that when I allow a hitter back into the count -- if it's 0-2, and I try to go chase pitch, chase pitch, and he takes them -- I have confidence in that pitch to go ball-to-strike. 

"I'll have a hitter thinking he's confident up there, like, 'Oh, I can see when it's a ball, and I'm spitting on all these good pitches,' and then all of a sudden I throw one that looks even more like a ball, and it finishes as a strike."

King had to learn how to do that -- how to land his sinker in just the right spot to make the hitter take it for a called strike. It wasn't so simple as, for example, aiming the pitch at the front hip of a left-handed hitter and watching the movement carry it onto the corner. That does work against a lot of players, but for hitters who use more open batting stances or stand farther off the plate -- King cited Jason Heyward as one example -- he has to adjust his target to make sure the pitch actually gets all the way to the zone.

That was a skill he picked up by talking to Didi Gregorius, his teammate on the Yankees when he first came up to the big leagues. The left-handed-hitting Gregorius explained to King how when he would face someone like longtime Red Sox starter Clay Buchholz, he'd sometimes open up his batting stance. Why? To confuse the pitcher's target. Gregorius knew Buchholz wanted to catch him with front-door sinkers, so he wanted to make it harder for Buchholz to lock onto his front hip as a sightline to land that pitch for a strike. If Gregorius opened up his hip, and Buchholz still aimed his sinker at it, that pitch would become a ball inside.

Years later, that bit of wisdom has become part of how King pitches to the scouting reports so successfully. The hitter's perspective shared by Gregorius then helped teach him how to use hitters' perspectives against them now.

For one thing, he doesn't leave any room for such trickery by opposing hitters.

"When I'm doing my scouting, I'm typically looking at pitchers with similar arsenals," King said. "Like, I know that Logan Webb is trying to front-hip a guy. And so when I'm watching Logan Webb, and I'm seeing that guy's stance, he's probably going to have the same stance against me, if he's a guy that changes his stance based on the pitcher."

But more than that, he's just thorough in his preparation.

"I know certain hitters, in certain counts -- based on their scouting report -- are looking for pitches in certain areas," King said. "And because I can get anywhere from 16 to 24 inches of horizontal movement [on my sinker], I can throw a pitch that's nowhere close to the area that they want to swing at and still have it start there and finish as a strike."

Often, that's with two strikes, where the hitter is expecting a chase pitch, King's sweeper off the plate or his changeup down, but instead gets a sinker that runs into the strike zone. But it doesn't have to be. King will use his sinker to steal a strike early in an at-bat, too, and in those cases, it doesn't even necessarily have to trick the hitter into thinking it's a ball per se.

"Or it's just a pitch that they don't want," King explained. "So out of hand, they're looking for a pitch middle-in, or they're looking for a pitch out over [the plate], and they see it right out of hand as a ball that's not in their area, so they shut it down."