Mike Soroka Is Starring for the Team That Once Spun Him Into a Crisis

The once snakebitten pitcher was sent down to the minors in 2023 after a beating by the Diamondbacks. Now his comeback story is reaching new heights in Arizona.

Mike Soroka has won both of his starts with the Diamondbacks after earning a win in just three of his 47 games over the last two seasons. | Joe Rondone/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there; I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
— Michelangelo

PHOENIX — Nolan Arenado put a smile on the face of Mike Soroka. When the newly minted Arizona Diamondbacks teammates met in spring training, Arenado provided validation for how far Soroka has come back from injury, ineffectiveness and, at the rate he was going, the brink of the end of his major league pitching career.

“I remember seeing you in ’23,” the third baseman told Soroka. “I didn’t really remember a whole ton. And then spring training last year? I was like, Whoa! That’s a whole lot different.”

Soroka smiled. Arenado made sure his point was taken the right way.

“Different—in a good way,” he said.

Two impressive starts into his season, and entering a third Friday night in Philadelphia, Soroka is one of the better feel-good stories of the season. An All-Star at age 21 in 2019 with a classic heavy sinker style, he fell so off the baseball map he made only nine MLB starts over the next four years. Then he went 0–10 for the losingest team in MLB history. The year after that he went 3–8 with trips to the IL for injuries to his biceps and shoulder.

Signed to a one-year, $7.5 million flier, he is 2–0 with a 0.90 ERA and the nastiest, what-the-heck-is-that Frisbee of a breaking ball since Corey Kluber. It defies definition, if not the known laws of physics.

Trial and error

Perseverance is rewarded. But it’s not just the story of working hard. Soroka had done enough of that, and it got him nowhere, or more specifically, a one-way ticket from the Atlanta Braves to Triple A Gwinnett. No, this also is the story of working smarter, about how if you find the right trainers, the right teachers, the right doctors and the right technology, you can reinvent yourself as a pitcher. Like Charlie Morton, Roy Halladay and Jake Arrieta, only with more modern technology, Soroka is proof that pitching careers can be saved if you dare to change just about everything.

“You know, there are so many layers to the cake, right?” Soroka says. “People see these last couple of things kind of come together and they assume it’s just one puzzle piece that finally fit. But they didn’t see all the other stuff going into it.

“It was difficult. There were a lot of people that helped me along the way ... a training group, lots of medical people ... it’s a group effort, really. And I’m not done making progress. You never are, in any sort of way. And that’s part of this thing that I learned to love—that I’m always going to be addicted to making progress one way or another. Now that’s best served by getting to know how to truly pitch again and exploit hitters’ weaknesses and use the new tools that I have.

“It was a lot of trial and error. Obviously, looking back on it, I think I could have done it in a quarter of the time knowing what I know now. But it’s the mistakes you learn from.”

The worst of it emotionally was when Soroka tore his Achilles in 2020 and re-tore it 10 months later. But the moment that changed him as a pitcher happened June 4, 2023, when the Diamondbacks rocked him for five runs on seven hits in less than four innings. After the game the Braves sent him and his 8.38 ERA to Gwinnett.

“I got my ass handed to me by the Diamondbacks and got sent down,” he says. “Right then and there I just realized my stuff wasn’t playing. Command wasn’t great. Wasn’t missing bats. I just felt like I was working really, really, really hard to get not great results.

“So, I immediately then dove into what I thought I needed to do and kind of just put aside immediate performance.”

Soroka told the Braves about his “trial and error” plan. The idea was to try new methods and pitches without worrying about the results that a pitcher traditionally would need to climb back to the majors. 

“And the Braves were supportive of that,” Soroka says. “[President Alex] Anthopolous was always supportive, saying, ‘Listen, I believe you can figure it out one day.’ That was great to hear. And the two pitching guys over there, Craig Bjornson and Paul Davis, helped me a ton.

“Just saying, ‘It’s okay. We’re going to try this next start,’ or ‘We’re going to try this next bullpen and see how it feels. We’re going to explore things.’ The reality is guys get a chance to do that in instructs and in fall ball and in their universities and offseasons, whereas on this level it’s hard.

“There was always the battle of, ‘Okay, do I go to what’s comfortable and just try to perform, or do I try to make a change to play this game for as long as I can?’ The hope is you change to have better stuff and better command and better ability to stay healthy.”

Soroka pitches for the Braves against the Diamondbacks on June 4, 2023, his last start before committing to changing the way he pitched. | Joseph Rondone-Imagn Images

In the 2023–24 offseason the Braves traded Soroka to the White Sox. He sought help from Bob Keyes of Biokinetics 3D. He started to learn new movement patterns on the mound.

“People are going to say, ‘Oh, well, you had so much success doing it the way you were doing it,’” Soroka says. “But the reality was I was a 21-year-old that hurt all the time and had some big injuries. So, I also knew there was more in there athletically. I was watching myself and thinking, you know, I’m working way too hard for 91 [mph].’

“Yeah, the ball’s sinking. But really, if you go back and watch the reason I had success it was location and secondary stuff. I’ve always been able to spin it. That never changed, no matter how I threw.”

There is a video on YouTube of a 16-year-old Soroka pitching at the Area Code Games, an amateur showcase of top talent. He is slinging the ball from a low arm slot, his natural slot.

 “And then over the years, it just climbed and climbed and climbed,” he says. 

Sinkerball pitchers traditionally are taught to “get on top of the ball” and throw over their front leg with a short stride. But the higher arm slot stressed his shoulder and reduced his real superpower, the ability to get around the baseball with rotational force to spin it, like the superpower Arrieta found with the Cubs.

Keyes and the folks at Biokinetics 3D worked with Soroka on moving more efficiently. He kept the ball in his glove longer, sunk deeper into his back leg, deployed a more “drop-and-drive” force from his lower half instead of the more upright traditional sinker methodology and lowered his arm angle to a slot that felt more natural. He transmogrified his tight slider into a hellacious slurve. He was reborn as a breaking ball pitcher with one of the 10 most off-set deliveries of any right-handed starter (30 inches to the third base side of mid-rubber), joining the likes of elite slingers such as Nolan McLean and Paul Skenes.

“I kind of went backward a little bit at the beginning of ’24,” Soroka says, “and then I was sent to the bullpen with the White Sox. That’s when I became really, really stubborn with [the new delivery] and decided, ‘This is the way I’m gonna go. And if anybody wants to help me, I’m welcoming them. Anybody that says, ‘It’s not gonna work’? I don’t care.”

He went 0–10 in 2024 for the 121-loss White Sox team, joining Steve Gerkin (0–12) of the 1942 A’s and Terry Felton (0–13) of the 1982 Twins as the only winless AL pitchers with double-digit losses. He signed with Washington for the 2025 season and posted the best strikeout rate of his career (9.6 per nine) but was battered the third time he tried to work through lineups (1.041 OPS). The Nationals traded him to the Cubs, who received only 8 1/3 innings from him before another shoulder injury sidelined him. But two months in Chicago allowed Soroka to work with Tyler Zombro, a Cubs special assistant.

“That was really big for me,” Soroka says, “in learning exactly where I can be at my best right now. A lot of what he talked about was the ability to rotate and still be somewhat vertical through release—to have the ability to throw anything.”

Soroka’s time with the Cubs last year was brief, though he did start Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the Brewers. | Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

An adaptation to the modern age

The young 21-year-old upright, sinkerball pitcher has grown into a Kluber-type sharpshooter who from a low arm slot can make the baseball move in four directions on both sides of the plate. In order of usage, he has a slurve that breaks violently glove side, a four-seamer with ride up, a changeup that drops, a sinker that runs arm side and a cutter, a new pitch this year, that breaks short and late glove side. In his pocket he has a gyro spin slider and a sweeper that he hasn’t deployed yet.

Statcast

“If you look at the best starting pitchers in baseball now, for the most part, they have at least five pitches,” Soroka says. “Even somebody like [Garrett] Crochet. I’m amazed how much he’s changed. Everybody’s doing this. You have to make the ball move four different ways.”

Back in 2019, Soroka threw his sinker 45% of the time. Hitters pounded it into the ground. But the effectiveness of a bread-and-butter pitch has diminished in today’s game because of the Trajekt pitching machine. Hitters can train to hit an exact replica of a specialty pitch.

“It’s understanding now with Trajekt and the technology that we have in baseball, they're able to go in there and see the pitch over and over and over again,” he says. “You still have to execute, but it’s a different game. I was kind of key-holing myself a little bit with essentially two pitches. If I didn’t throw sinkers to lefties and I didn’t really throw a ton of changeups I had to play the execute game—and execute flawlessly. So, now it’s giving me a greater margin for error.”

Among all the tricks Soroka can do with a baseball, the slurve is his show stopper. Over the past two seasons he has thrown 598 of them and given up just 14 hits. He can vary the spin and throw it to both sides of the plate, especially flummoxing righthanders with front-door slurves. “You give them a ton of different shapes to worry about plus good stuff and command, and I think it makes for a pretty tough day,” he says. His slurve is among the most elite pitches in baseball:

Toughest Pitch Types to Hit, 2025-26 (Min. 500 pitches)

Pitcher	Pitch	Batting Average Against
Andrés Muñoz	Slider	.101
Gavin Williams	Curveball	.109
Michael Soroka	Slurve	.113
Yoshinobu Yamamoto	Splitter	.127

Several teams wanted to sign Soroka as a hybrid pitcher who can swing back and forth between the rotation and bullpen. Soroka wanted to start. The Diamondbacks gave him the chance. Their pitching coach, Brian Kaplan, worked with Soroka in three winters starting in 2018 at Cressey Sports Performance. Soroka spent the past winter refining his movements and pitch shapes with Casey Upperman at Rotational Athlete Solutions in Scottsdale.

The sample is small, but the numbers suggest the Diamondbacks found a hidden gem, a 28-year-old pitcher with front-of-the-rotation stuff for $7.5 million. Right-handed hitters are 1-for-15 with eight strikeouts against him. Batters are hitting .136 against his two-strike pitches.

About a decade ago velocity changed the game, as smart people understood that velocity could be taught. Hitters adjusted. Today’s tech-savvy game has turned pitching into a more creative art form than it ever has been. It is ruled by the three S’s of pitching: spin, sequencing and shaping. Soroka took the long way to get there, but he may be the best example of how to unlock the modern pitcher.

“We can have debates on what proper mechanics look like,” he says, “but in reality, it’s a whole lot more in depth than that. I just had to trust that there was going to be a process of ups and downs. It wasn’t going to be linear.

“But here’s what I know: I still haven’t seen anybody get better at moving—actually using their body better—and their stuff gets worse. I’ve never seen that. So, it’s nice to see and hear validation.”

The exact quote from Michelangelo at the top of this article has varied over the centuries, including a reference to seeing an angel within a block of marble and setting it free, but the theme remains the same. He believed art is revealed more than it is created from nothing. In that way pitching is an art. It took years, but Soroka revealed the pitcher within. He is proof of another philosophy of Il Divino: Ancora imparo—“I am still learning.”

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