There's a new thing for King this spring

PEORIA, Ariz. -- Michael King was one of the most effective starting pitchers in baseball last season. In his mind, he’s just starting to figure it out.

King went 13-9 with a 2.95 ERA in his first year with the Padres -- and first as a full-time big league starter -- after being acquired from the Yankees as part of the Juan Soto trade. After posting a 5.00 ERA through April, King had a 2.42 ERA over his final 24 outings.

“If you remove April, Michael may have been the clear-cut Cy Young winner,” Padres manager Mike Shildt said. “He’s on a mission to go prove that he's going to be an established, top-of-the-line, front-end rotation guy.”

That mission begins with one specific goal in 2025: Throw 200 innings. To get there, King plans to continue learning everything he can from his veteran teammates. That’s nothing new for the right-hander, who has always been a sponge of sorts, especially since he made the transition from reliever to starter in August 2023.

Gerrit Cole taught him how to think about pitch sequences when facing a hitter for the second or third time in a game. Joe Musgrove showed him the importance of inducing soft contact rather than always looking to miss bats, something King often found himself doing as a late-inning reliever. As a result, King’s scouting process changed dramatically for the better.

“In April and May, I was doing scouting, trying to get as much swing-and-miss as I possibly can,” King said. “I'd look up and feel really good, but I would go four innings with 90 pitches. Is that actually valuable to the team? My goal of 200 innings, I need to be in those games where I don't have my best stuff.”

Yu Darvish’s repertoire is so unique -- “He has 12 pitches, so I’m never going to sequence as well as this dude,” King said -- but the 38-year-old remains highly effective as he enters his 20th professional season between Japan and the Majors. King turns 30 in May and is entering his sixth full Major League season, but he’s taking cues from Darvish on things from nutrition to his after-start throwing program with the hope that he can pitch well for another decade.

Jameson Taillon, King’s teammate in New York, liked to wait until he was built up to 40-45 pitches before making his spring debut. The theory was simple: What good is a two-inning outing for a starter, whose job is to turn over a lineup and face hitters multiple times?

So King proposed a plan to pitching coach Ruben Niebla that would delay his first Cactus League outing. Niebla was on board, allowing King to do his early work on the back fields against teammates in simulated outings. His 2025 Cactus League debut is penciled in for Wednesday.

“If I’m facing Bogey or Manny,” King said, “I have guys that have immediate feedback for me and are smart. So now I can actually learn something from it. If I go out there and face the Mariners in a two-inning game, I'm not able to ask Randy Arozarena, ‘Hey, why did you take that pitch?’”

King’s thirst for learning extends beyond the art of pitching. As he prepares to enter his final season prior to free agency, King knows that many players have allowed that anxiety to overwhelm them. On the pressure of pitching in a contract year, King immediately recalled some advice he got from Mike Gambino, his coach at Boston College, as he pitched in his final year before the MLB Draft.

“He said, ‘If you think about raising your Draft stock every time you pitch, it's going to add way too much pressure on yourself,’” King said. “I like putting pressure on myself, but that's not good pressure; that’s thinking about the future. My coach said, ‘Just focus on winning, and your numbers are going to show up.’”

King saw that play out in 2022 after Aaron Judge rejected the Yankees’ contract extension offer, declaring he would test free agency at the end of the season.

“His whole demeanor was, ‘I'm going to make the guy next to me the best player he can be and we're going to win a bunch of games,’” King said. “It was like he didn't care about his numbers.”

Judge hit an AL-record 62 homers that season, then signed a $360 million deal to stay with the Yankees.

“I would be lying to you if I said [free agency] hasn’t crossed my mind,” King said. “But when I'm in the middle of the season and I have a bad outing, I don't want it to spiral into something like, ‘I'm thinking about what could be next year and I'm having these bad outings.’ Make it a team thing. Make it a, ‘We need to win here,’ instead of, ‘I need to pitch better so I can go to free agency.’ If a team sees that you can let your walk year be a side note in your brain, that's valuable.”