Why Michael King Would Be a Great Fit for the Atlanta Braves

With a reasonable price tag and room to grow, King could be the smart upside play Atlanta’s rotation needs.

(After this newsletter was submitted for publication, the team announced that Walt Weiss has been named the next manager. We’ll have a second newsletter coming out sometime this afternoon after the introductory press conference with Weiss and Alex Anthopoulos.)

The Atlanta Braves want to add a starter this winter, calling it a “front burner” focus. The problem is, they also want to upgrade at shortstop, add to their bullpen, and potentially add a big bat as well. The available payroll dollars only go so far, and it feels like Atlanta will need to cut a corner somewhere.

That is, unless they can find some value in one of their signings, and I think I know just who that free agent could be. Let’s talk about Michael King.

Why would King be cheaper?

I’ve commonly referred to the “Big Four” when talking about this free agent pitching class: Framber Valdez of the Houston Astros, Zac Gallen of the Arizona Diamondbacks, King, and his teammate Dylan Cease of the San Diego Padres. Entering the season, they looked to be the best starters available on the market.

They still are, but circumstances have changed for some of them. Valdez (3.66 ERA) and Cease (4.55 ERA) both underperformed a bit, but are largely expected to still receive the same contracts as before due to strong peripherals and career performance.

Gallen had a nightmare of a season, putting up the worst ERA of the bunch (4.83) and bringing a career worst (and below MLB average) 21.5% strikeout rate with it. Without an injury to blame for the precipitous drop in performance, there will be teams wary of paying full freight for the 30-year-old.

King, by contrast, took a small step back from his breakout 2024 (2.95 ERA) with a 3.44 mark this season, but also missed time due to a nerve impingement in his shoulder and knee inflammation as he tried to return to the mound. An injury like this has the potential to suppress his market somewhat, meaning there could be some additional value there if he’s fully recovered from the shoulder issue.

The medicals on this one will be important. We saw a situation similar to this last season, where the Braves reportedly had a deal in place with Jeff Hoffman before backing out over concerns with his shoulder. Per reports, the Baltimore Orioles also backed out before he eventually signed with the Toronto Blue Jays and pitched a full, healthy season. Both the Braves and Orioles, per the reports, would have used Hoffman as a starter, but he remained in the bullpen for Toronto and threw a combined 80.1 innings between the regular season and postseason.

Not the same mileage on his arm

One of the perils of signing free agent starters to a long-term deal is the fact that they have accumulated a lot of innings on their arms, making them potentially riskier from a health standpoint. Looking at some recent pitcher signings, Max Fried joined the New York Yankees last winter with a combined 960 MLB innings on his left arm, while Corbin Burnes joined the Arizona Diamondbacks with 930.2 innings on his right arm (and promptly went down for Tommy John surgery).

Michael King, owing to his early-career usage as a reliever and swingman with the Yankees, currently has just 509.2 innings despite being roughly the same age as both Fried and Burnes when they signed.

There are pros and cons here on this, clearly. While the total mileage on the arm is lower, there is no direct or predictable correlation between innings pitched and future injury potential. After all, King did miss time just this season with a shoulder issue - there’s no guarantee that he stays healthier than some of his peers in the free agent class simply because he’s thrown fewer innings in his career.

But it does lend to workload conversations as well. King broke out in his first full year as a starter for San Diego in 2024, making 30 starts and pitching 173.2 innings of 2.95 ERA ball. He made only half that number of starts this season, throwing 73.1 innings with a slight uptick in his ERA (to 3.44) and a drop in his strikeout rate from 27.7% to 24.7%. How many innings can he reliably deliver in 2026? We saw a similar situation come up with Reynaldo López, whose first year in the rotation saw him give Atlanta 135.2 innings of 1.99 ball but miss a lot of time late and essentially all of 2025 with shoulder trouble that necessitated surgery.

Again, the medicals matter here.

There’s also room for King to get better

King’s a five-pitch pitcher, using both a sinker and a four-seam fastball, a changeup, and two sliders, a traditional one and a sweeper.

Looking at the pitch plot for King, there’s an interesting observation to be made about his arsenal: Everything moves horizontally, with nothing being much of a vertical threat unless the location calls for it to be thrown low.

There is a simple explanation for that, obviously - his 27° arm angle is closer to sidearm than most, meaning that a horizontal game is clearly the way to go. But that doesn’t mean that he’s a finished product as a starter. Amid the shoulder issues this season, there were a few areas where his stuff regressed and can improve.

Strangely, I don’t know if the changes in his slider were intentional or not - he threw it 2 mph harder in 2024, coming in at 85.7 mph, than this season’s 83.8 mph. But dropping some velo off it also allowed it to pick up over 2.5 inches of drop, making it work more like a traditional slider. The batting average allowed on the pitch dropped from .281 to .222, albeit with a small sample size in both seasons due to its 5.6% usage.

The biggest performance knocks on King came down to his slugging allowed on his four-seam fastball (from .402 to .814) and sweeper (.304 to .476). Both pitches need to return to their career norms, but the fastball’s the bigger issue. King allowed a higher incidence of barrels this season (from 4.7% barrel/PA to 18.9%) because too many heaters leaked down into the middle of the zone. King more than doubled the number of barrels allowed on four-seamers in attack zones 4-6¹ from last season and more than tripled the number of barrels allowed on four-seamers in the bottom or middle third of the zone.

Was this due to his shoulder issue directly impacting his command, or was this just bad luck and something that would normalize? Either way, it feels like if it’s correctable, King’s performance should be able to rebound in 2026.

And to be clear, the barrels/hard hits are the biggest issue with King’s performance last year. He went from a 6.2% rate allowed in 2024 (79th percentile) to 11.4% (7th percentile) this season. While his sweeper spiked a bit in barrels allowed, too, the issue was predominantly the four-seamer. Outside of the barrels, his strikeout rate was within 3% of last year’s mark (and still better than league average), his walk rate was within 0.3% of last year’s mark, and he actually made a good trade in giving up² line drives (down 6%) for more fly balls (+7%).

Fix the barrels and it feels like you’ve fixed Michael King.

So, what will it take to sign him?

That’s the big question here - how does the league approach a promising young player coming off of both an injury and a dip in performance after a breakout year? The projection systems out there vary wildly in their estimates of his next contract, but there’s a running theme to several of them:

Baseball America: 4/$110M
Spotrac: 4/$92M
The Athletic: 3/$75M
MLBTR: “boxed out of the five-, six-, or seven-year offers”

Due to the fact that he turns 31 next year and is coming off a nerve issue, which is always a bit more uncertain of a recovery, it’s increasingly likely that King’s not going to receive the type of long-term commitment that Alex Anthopoulos has avoided in the past. While there’s still the likelihood of a qualifying offer to contend with, the overall cost and long-term exposure are still lower than the likely long-term deal that Cease and Valdez will receive this winter (or that Fried received last winter, signing for seven years with the Yankees).

Spotrac has King as $23M AAV, while Baseball America sees it more around $27.5M. Either way, a deal for King feels more realistic than either going incredibly long-term with Cease or still swallowing the qualifying offer for a short-term pillow deal with Gallen. It wouldn’t be a blockbuster, but it might be one of those moves that looks brilliant in hindsight.

1. Horizontally, the middle third of the zone

2. King’s average and slug allowed on fly balls was .213/.689, while line drives were .692 and 1.154.