On Thursday, the Nationals finally got up off their hands to make their first major league signing of an offseason where most of the marquee targets have come off the board. That acquisition, 27-year-old right-handed pitcher Michael Soroka on a one-year, $9 million contract, was not one of those marquee targets, but it tracks with the organization's recent history of shopping on the fringes and looking to find low-cost diamonds in the rough. Regardless of one's perspective on that being the team's predominant approach to the free agent market over the past few years, there is upside in the Soroka acquisition.
In November, MLB.com stats analyst Mike Petriello authored a piece talking about Soroka's transition to the bullpen midway through 2024 after making the White Sox' Opening Day rotation. Soroka's time as a starter on the Southside was disastrous, allowing a 6.39 ERA in 9 starts, walking as many guys as he struck out, and yielding 10 home runs in 43.2 innings with a third of all balls in play resulting in hard contact. In mid-May, he moved to the bullpen, and hit the injured list two months later in July with a strain of the shoulder on his throwing arm.
Before getting hurt, Soroka was looking excellent out of the bullpen. When he returned for three appearances to end the year, he looked even better, striking out 13 of the 26 batters he faced; something that is exceptionally difficult to do even in a small sample. Upon the bullpen assignment, Soroka's velocity jumped. As Petriello writes, that's to be expected for a guy moving to the bullpen from the rotation, especially at his age, but this translated to an outrageous relief campaign, even if it was a bit abbreviated. Among all pitchers last year with at least 30 innings in relief (Soroka threw 36), he ranks first in K/9 (15.00), 2nd in K% (39.0, behind only Athletics All-Star Mason Miller), and in the top 30 out of 254 in both K-BB% and FIP- (park-adjusted FIP, normalized to 100, where lower is better). We look at these peripherals for a reason: because they're the biggest indicators of just how large the strides he made were.
Soroka also cut the usage of his sinker, which he relied on to induce ground balls as a starter, when he moved to the bullpen, favoring his four-seam fastball and his slider, the latter of which yielded a 73 wRC+ against hitters over the course of the season (including his time in the rotation). This caused an expected jump in flyball rate, but with that also came a decrease in the number of his pitches batters were pulling, an increase in those they were late on (hitting the other way), and a drop in the rate of hard contact allowed from 33% to 21%.
So when Soroka moved to the bullpen and made changes to his approach, he increased both his K rate and velocity, while allowing less quality contact when he did get hit. That's all fine and dandy, but there's one major issue - the Nationals don't plan on using Michael out of the bullpen. He signed on Thursday as a starter, and will likely be somewhere from the middle to the back of the rotation on Opening Day. Could that really work?
Both parties seem to think so, as Spencer Nusbaum reported for the Washington Post on Friday. Soroka attended a Zoom meeting with reporters after the signing in which he attributed much of his injury woes to raw, undeveloped mechanics that flew under the radar after the success of his 2019 rookie campaign. He used that to justify being unafraid of the full-season starter workload, believing that so long as his mechanical issues are kept at bay, both the velocity and results will continue to come around. Evidently the organization agreed, which is why he selected Washington over the likely several other parties that inquired as to his availability as a relief pitcher.
The Nationals aren't unaccustomed to these reclamation projects: Trevor Williams had almost exclusively been used in relief towards the end of his time with the Mets, and while his 2023 in a starting role with Washington was disastrous, the team defied all expectations by continuing to pitch him to shocking success in 2024 (even if he wasn't able to get healthy in time for the team to reap the benefits by trading him).
The baseball offseason is often characterized by the optics that come alongside how general managers approach their roster construction. I'd be remiss to pretend that the Nationals spending a month and a half not even really being involved in credible rumors about any major free agents then making their first signing being someone who's torn his Achilles twice in the last five years somehow reflects positively on the organization. We still have no idea if general manager Mike Rizzo is seriously pursuing someone like Alex Bregman, or if he's so much as inquired with Rōki Sasaki's camp (we wouldn't land him anyway, but at least make a presentation for him. The Rockies and White Sox did!); and for the big money guys, even if Rizzo wants to make a splash, we don't know if Mark Lerner and Co. will allow him to anyway.
But this team was always going to make a couple fringy acquisitions regardless of their status on the names at the top of the market, and to steal a line from national baseball writer at Newsweek Sports J.P. Hoornstra, there's no such thing as a bad one-year contract. $9 million is a drop in the bucket for a team that was going to have to add to their payroll one way or another or risk getting outspent by the White Sox that Soroka just left, and his upside could represent another savvy, under-the-radar acquisition by Mike Rizzo's front office that made a waiver claim on Robert Garcia a couple years ago and turned Lane Thomas into José Tena and the team's new No. 6 prospect per MLB Pipeline in Alex Clemmey at the deadline last year. If Soroka can put the pieces together and remain both healthy and effective out of the rotation, he could have the front office singing O, Canada all the way to the trade deadline.