Introduction:

After finishing his encouraging 2018 rookie season on the injured list due to a shoulder injury, Soroka entered his sophomore campaign at the age of 21 with concerns about his durability. Soroka would respond by pitching 174.2 innings in 2019 to a total of 4.0 fWAR, which was good enough to rank him 22 in all of MLB and 13 in the NL. In fact, Soroka pitched so well he earned himself the third spot in the Braves’ playoff rotation.

And while any 4.0 fWAR pitcher can be exciting, what is most interesting about Mike’s success is that he doesn’t generate a lot of strikeouts, doesn't use his four-seam fastball much, and relies on a pitch most pitchers are essentially abandoning. In fact, Soroka’s four-seam fastball, the preference of pitchers, coaches, and draft strategies, is merely acceptable, but definitely not elite.

So yes, Mike Soroka is pretty good at baseball. But why? More importantly, is it repeatable and/or sustainable? Is 2019 Soroka the Real Slim Shady?

These questions are why I feel it worthy of digging deeper into Soroka's arsenal, and then his game execution, to understand why Soroka had success.

Overview:

I intend this to be a mini-series that explores Soroka from the macro to the micro. In Section I, we will take an in-depth look into Soroka’s entire arsenal by examining each of his pitches. Each pitch will be its own chapter, with Chapter I being his sinker. This section will first look at the quality of each pitch in order of pitch frequency, examining each by a number of characteristics (such as velocity, horizontal and vertical movement relative to league average, general location of pitches, etc.). Then we will examine the measured results from each in 2019, looking at how well each pitch did in relation to league average. Finally, we will end by exploring Soroka’s release point with each of the four main pitches.

Once we have established what tools Soroka has in his toolbox, Section II will address Soroka’s pitching approach by examining when Soroka employs each pitch. In other words, Section I will identify WHAT Soroka throws. Section II will study WHEN and WHERE Soroka throws it.

Section III will begin the micro analysis of Soroka’s pitching by doing a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of Soroka’s best (subjective, but it’s my article so I get to choose) game in 2019. The intent is to see what Soroka did when he was at the top of his game.

Section IV will continue the micro analysis of Soroka’s pitching by doing a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of Soroka’s worst game in 2019. The intent is to see what Soroka did differently in this game compared to his best game and his baseline profile.

If time and interest allow, Section V will begin projecting Soroka into the future. In other words, taking the baseline established and the "lessons learned" from Soroka’s best and worst outings, we will then game plan an approach to use against opponents. Specifically, the vision is to start with the Nationals lineup and assess the hitting tendencies of their starting lineup. Perhaps we might pull Soroka’s 2019 appearances against the Nationals and compare the actual approach vs our approach and see how they compare/contrast.

Epilogue:

Perhaps I'm putting the cart before the horse in order to give some context for the rest of this project; however, I think it provides context to know what the big picture looks like to help understand the role of each individual piece. So before we look at Soroka's pitches individually, we should do a quick dive into Soroka's 2019 results and see what we discover.

2019 in Review

Let's start with basic, surface level stats:

As expected, Soroka's 2.68 ERA and 1.11 WHIP show a very productive season. But how do his peripherals look compared to league average?

From that, we see that he is below average in many regards, and considerably below average in whiff% and k%. What Soroka did have going for him, though, was his barrel rate (85th percentile is really good) and exit velocity (75th percentile is pretty good). However, neither is elite; in fact, neither are the best on the Braves rotation:

What we see here is that Soroka was only 3rd on his own rotation for percentage of barrels per plate appearance, though that is still better than league average. Interestingly, his 3.7 Brls/PA% jumps considerably to 5.1 Brls/BBE % (Percentage of barrels per batted ball event). What this suggests is that non-batted ball events (walks and strike outs) factor in pretty heavily; i.e. Soroka does an elite job of limiting barrels per plate appearance, but because he does not generate many strikeouts (nor walk many), his percentage of barrels per every time the ball is put in play is a bit higher, while still below league average. Seeing as walks and strikeouts very much factor into a pitcher's success, having a better Brls/PA% is more imporant, and Soroka excelled here.

Similarly, his average exit velocity (87 MPH) was better than league average (75th percentile), which improved significantly when just looking at ground balls (84.3). Within 0.1 MPH with Sean Newcomb, Soroka virtually tied for the lead among Braves pitchers for best exit velocity.

So that's the good news; from there we go to the not-so-good news. Soroka's xERA was only in the 66th percentile, which is acceptable but a far cry from his actual 2.68 ERA (which was third in the NL and 5th in MLB). As seen below, his xERA was 4.48. Was Soroka simply lucky? How did he manage to outperform his ERA by so much? This is a potential area of concern, and a question that hopefully our indepth analysis of Soroka will help explain.

Going one step further, for those who do not value ERA, Soroka also slightly out performed his Expected Field Indipendent Pitching (xFIP) stat. His 3.45 FIP was good enough for 7th in the NL and 14th in MLB.

If we consider weighted on-base average (wOBA), Soroka significantly outperformed his expected wOBA (xwOBA).

And the bad news? If you look back to the percentile chart above, Soroka doesn't get many whiffs, doesn't get many strikeouts, and actually is in the 39th percentile (not good at all!) for Hard Hit %. So how do we reconcile that he gets hit hard (39th percentile because 37.5% of balls are hit 95+ MPH), but doesn't give up many barrels and has a really good average exit velocity? Two things (at least): ground balls and soft contact.

The majority of hard hit balls are hit low; many pounded right into the ground.

As you can tell, Soroka gets 51.2% of balls hit on the ground. So even if the ball is hit hard, it is limited in how much damage it can do. And although he gets hit hard at an alarming rate, he also is able to neutralize that by getting a lot of weak contact as well (19%). How do those numbers stack up against the rest of the NL? Glad you asked:

I think that adequately summarizes 2019 as a whole: Soroka is elite at inducing soft contact despite not being able to get wiffs or strikeouts. And although he gave up an alarming rate of hard hit balls, his elite ground ball rate allowed for most of those hard hit balls to do little damage. Becuase he keeps the ball down, he was successful at avoiding barreled balls despite the hard contact allowed. And due to Atlanta's above average defense, Soroka was able to outproduce his xERA.

But up until now we have only looked at the season as one event. The reality is that a season is a zoo of many different events. Let's look at the season as a collection of months:

The big take away from this chart is that (based on ERA and wOBA) June, July, and September were not great.

There isn't one silver bullet to explain struggles, and with each month only being approximatley 120 batters faced, small sample size comes into play. But there are a number of things happening to suggest that the struggles were not one persistent problem. For example, his strikeout rates dropped in June and Aug, which were two of his three worst xFIP months. Simultaneously, his HR/9 increased once the weather got warmer (expected) but got dangeroulsy high at the end of the season (fatigue?). Interestingly, his 9.67 K/9 in Sept/Oct was his best since April, yet that same period was the worst FIP of the season. Perhaps Soroka was trying to get strikeouts at the expense of ground balls? While we cannot prove intent, the following chart (see below) does support the theory that his elevated strikeout rate came at the expense of his groundball percentage.

Coincidentally, his Sept/Oct not only saw an elevated strikeout rate and decreased groundball rate, but it also saw a horrific HR/FB spike and his worst FIP.

One take away moving forward is that Soroka is at his best when he induces ground balls, even if they are hit hard, and avoids trying to get strike outs at the expense of challenging hitters with pitches they can potentially elevate. (Or if he is going to attempt to increase his stirkeout rate, he should find a different way to approach it than what happened in Sept/Oct).

So that was a lot of words and charts to get to this final point: Soroka's performance was significantly better than what should have been expected based on xERA and xFIP. This perspective may be useful when analyzing Soroka's individual pieces. Perhaps there is a reason, other than luck, that Soroka was so good in 2019, and that was because he was elite at keeping the ball on the ground and was above average at allowing walks.

Section I: Soroka's Arsenal

Mike Soroka's arsenal consists of mainly four pitches, as seen in the Baseball Savant chart and graphic below:

• Release Point
  

Chapter I: The Sinker

First of all, the thing that should jump out the most is that Mike Soroka relies on his sinker. A lot. His 1140 sinkers in 2019 ranked 8th in all of MLB (Zach Davies of MIL led MLB with 1408 sinkers!). There is roughly a 26 percentage point difference in usage between his sinker and his four seam fastball. Section II will address this usage more, but for the sake of this article we simply want to recognize that it is his predominant pitch.

In Greg Maddux's induction into the Hall of Fame, he addressed his "basic pitching fundamentals: movement, location, the ability to change speeds, velocity - in that order." As Soroka is sometimes referred to as the Maple Maddux, I think it appropriate to tackle his pitches in that same order.

• Movement

The above image shows all four of Soroka’s pitches from the catcher’s view. Looking only at the sinker (orange) we see that it "cuts" back towards the right handed batter on average 16 inches (league average is 15 inches). It "drops" exactly at league average of 25 inches. Correspondingly, Soroka was 50th among qualified MLB pitchers in his sinker’s vertical movement in 2019 and 83rd in horizontal movement. In terms of movement, Soroka’s sinker is a fairly pedestrian pitch.

• Location

Here is a heatmap from the pitcher's view, showing Soroka's sinkers to right handed hitters:

Not surprising at all is that Soroka generally kept the ball down and inside to RHH despite leaving roughly 7% of his sinkers over the heart of the plate. When Soroka can locate his sinker inside, good things should happen. Here is a GIF courtesy of Ben Clemens:

One of Soroka's strengths is that he can use the sinker effectively against both right and left handed hitters. Soroka's heat map for left handed hitters looks very similar in overall spatial terms, with the hot spots being arm side and low. These pitches, of course, have the opposite effect to left handed hitters as they sink down and away from the LHH compared to running in on the RHH.

Of course, Soroka doesn't have to throw it away to LHH for it to be effective. In this1-2 count to a LHH, Soroka dialed up a little extra velocity on the pitch (95mph), located it on the lower inside quadrant, and got good vertical movement to produce something just filthy:

Look at the drop on this Mike Soroka fastball at 95mph.

It's stupid. pic.twitter.com/81BjzmNrHm

— Pitcher List (@PitcherList) May 2, 2025

It is also worth exploring Soroka's ability to locate "on the edge". As noted in the Epilogue, Soroka struggled in Sept/Oct with giving up homeruns. One might expect that those homeruns were from "mistake" pitches that caught too much plate.

Unfortunately, these charts don't distinguish which pitch was hit for a HR. Since all of the HR hit against Soroka were strikes, and only 2 were down in the zone and 10 were belt high, I think it is probably safe to assume that most of the HR were pitches that missed their spots. However, 5 of the 9 HR hit by LHH were on the outside part of the plate, so they didn't miss terribly bad at first glance. It would be interesting to know which pitches those were, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

Regardless, we do see that in September Soroka really struggled to locate his sinker on the edge of the strike zone. Inversely, as he missed the edge and landed in the middle of the plate, his exit velocity increased.

• Velocity

Further, Soroka was able to maintain amazing consistency with his sinker throughout the season, even when other pitches saw slight decrease (or increase? we'll look at the changeup another day) throughout the season.

• Results

Despite being Soroka's most utilized pitch, the sinker was also his most abused pitch. In fact, the 9 HR off the sinker represent 64% of his total HR allowed compared to his 44.5% pitch usage. If we include triples, this rate climbs to 69% of his worst outcomes resulted disproportionately from the sinker. This relationship is concerning. Though, this might be a common phenomena for any pitcher's most thrown pitch as the hitters are prepared for it. There are probably studies showing that the more a pitch is used, the less surprised hitters are and thus the less effective the pitch becomes. In that vein, it isn't surprising that Soroka's sinker was his most abused pitch overall. But mixing his sinker with other pitches more may be a point of consideration to be discussed at a later time.

Further, Soroka's late season struggles directly seem to coincide with his inibility for his sinker to get groundballs:

In line with not being a high strikeout pitcher, we see his sinker only managed a 12.5% whiff rate and a 13.8% put away rate. In short, Soroka doesn't fool hitters much with the pitch, and they don't usually miss it. Soroka's .290 BA and .311 XBA suggest he actually got a bit lucky and we might see a regression next year (to a worse batting average against). Similarly, his .414 SLG compared to his .448 XSLG and .322 WOBA to .343 XWOBA indicate Soroka either is lucky, or he is doing something else right to be able to get better results than expected with his sinker.

For the optimists out there: his early season dominance may have inflated his overall performance, but his late season struggles may have rested on struggling to locate his sinker low. This may be a mechancics issue related to late season fatigue, something that can be addressed and improved. Either from causation or correlation, Soroka's ability to locate his sinker and induce ground balls appears to be the key to avoiding HR and being a dominant pitcher.

Soroka relies on his sinker for a whopping 44.6% of all pitches thrown and uses it effectively against both left and right handed hitters. Yet despite his heavy reliance on a pitch most of baseball is forsaking, it is not rated as an elite pitch as it is actually below average in velocity and just slightly above average in movement. In fact, Soroka generates significantly below average whiff and strikeout percentages with his sinker. Further, it was Soroka's most abused pitch in 2019, which may lead him to slightly less reliance upon it moving forward. Regardless, Soroka finds success with the sinker from a combination of things, but likely from two main areas: all of his pitches have the same release point and his ability to hit his spots with the sinker. Soroka's pitch location and being able to keep the pitch low and avoid the heart of the plate has allowed him to avoid being barreled at a very good rate. Further, by keeping the ball low, Soroka has been among the league leaders in inducing ground balls, even when the ball gets hit hard. However, this rate decreased as the season wore on and Soroka suffered a dramatic increase in barrels, hard hit balls, and home runs by September. But since Soroka was able to maintain velocity of the pitch throughout the year, it is not a red flag of arm strength or injury that led to his late struggles. As his strikeout rate increased in September and ground ball rate increased, it may have been an intentional tweaking of game approach, or it might have been fatigue that affected fine motor skills (control) compared to gross motor skills (velocity). The data showing Edge % support this theory as Soroka began missing the corners of the plate; Soroka may have just started to lose fine precision and those hard hit balls became elevated at a higher rate. But with his ability to generate elite levels of ground balls with a pitch he can locate to both sides of the plate and against hitters from either side of the plate, it seems safe to bet that Soroka's floor remains high as he can continue to lean heavily on this pitch with good results. His sinker appears to be a parallel to Soroka as a pitcher; a pitch without a standout feature that defies expectations and generates successful outcomes through precision control. Perhaps Section II will reveal that Soroka's ability to mix his pitches, a reflection of his baseball IQ, further enhances the effectiveness of his Ol' Reliable.