Over two years ago, White Sox pitcher Michael Kopech was in the locker room of the team’s facility in Camelback Ranch revealing an obsession. He wasn’t shrinking away from the trauma of his elbow failing him, or the 2018 Tigers offense lighting him up as his velocity cratered in his final outing before Tommy John surgery. Instead he was watching it back repeatedly, parsing it for mechanical flaws that could be responsible for his injury.
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“There may be no way of telling, but there also may be something I can change to prevent this from happening again,” Kopech said in 2019.
While his long-term health remains to be seen, Kopech returning this season with two earned runs allowed and 17 strikeouts over 10 2/3 innings is not just about the same guy returning to the mound after injury. The fruit of his desire to make adjustments with the White Sox pitching development staff is already on display.
“He has the highest standard for himself that I think I’ve ever seen a player have,” pitching coordinator Everett Teaford told The Athletic.
Kopech’s first competitive innings, a little over a year after his surgery, came in October 2019 in instructional league. By then, he already had significant ideas of where he wanted his mechanics to go: simpler, smaller, repeatable.
“Michael wanted to shorten his arm path and get more in his legs, and kind of just smooth out his overall delivery,” Charlotte Knights pitching coach Matt Zaleski said. “And that’s what he wanted to do.”
Kopech had been moving toward that in his catch work and under the White Sox rehab pitching coach at the time, Brian Drahman. The end result may be less eye-popping of a change than Lucas Giolito’s transformation, but the goal was similar: he wanted to reduce the amount of motion that needed to be synced up in his delivery. Pitchers who are late getting their arm forward in their delivery can see negative effects in velocity, command and ultimately health. So instead of drawing his throwing arm out of his glove and extending it back, Kopech worked toward keeping it bent and moving it directly to firing position, to make sure he’s not still bringing it up when his front foot strikes the ground.
“When he was playing catch, it was very fluid, very easy, and everything came out on time, so it was one of those things to where to his credit, he nailed it,” said Zaleski, who is heavily involved at instructional league and spring training. “When his front foot hits, his hand’s up and it’s on time. You see all the pitchers with the high velocity and real solid command, they’re all in the exact same spot in their delivery at foot strike. And Michael’s one of those guys.”
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It was smooth enough that Zaleski and Teaford mostly saw their roles as making sure Kopech maintained his arm path, rather than becoming another guy who shortens up in the offseason but slowly backslides into old habits over the course of the season. But also, a year of parsing Kopech’s delivery for possible tweaks revealed more than just his arm path.
“A lot of pitching guys talk about if you get your first move wrong, then it’s going to be tough to correct all of that,” Teaford said.
The small step-back motion Kopech had in the modified windup in his only spring outing in March 2020 was understandably forgotten when baseball shut down a couple of days later. But that muted action, paired with a scoreless inning replete with curveballs thrown for strikes and peppering the top of the zone with high fastballs, represented a culmination of a lot of what Teaford and Zaleski had been pushing toward. And the first move was getting Kopech toward the first-base side of the pitching rubber and shrinking the size of his step back, making him less inclined to push himself too far toward third base and crossfire his way to the plate, and to think more in terms of working straight toward the mitt. It’s not like he needed a big windup anyway.
“He’s so strong and powerful that he doesn’t need a bunch of momentum,” Teaford said. “With the way his foot would kind of shift on the rubber at times, not intentionally, that kind of threw off his upper body because then his perception was getting off, and his feel of where he needed to be out front with his hand was inconsistent.”
“Really all you need to do is to have a little step and then get into the ground and create your ground force, and start driving your back leg toward home plate and the rest syncs up,” Zaleski said.
For someone whose best work clearly comes from riding his four-seam up and working vertically off of it with his off-speed stuff dropping down, it seemed like some of Kopech’s worst control stretches and difficulty manipulating his curveball arose from the unnecessary addition of commanding side to side. But as would become a running theme, he did not struggle long with the adjustment. After his first two sidelines of instructs, the conversation started to move past mechanics.
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“It happened real quick for him on the delivery side, which was nice,” Zaleski said. “Because then you can go into the sequencing of pitches, where his pitches play in the zone, and crisping up the entire repertoire.”
And the White Sox had a lot of ideas for his repertoire. Kopech has a high-90s four-seamer with a spin rate that’s in the top 10 percentile in baseball and similarly elite vertical movement. He already had a solid notion that his stuff played up in the zone, but Teaford and Zaleski tried to reinforce the idea that if he missed his spot, missing up at the letters with his fastball would be a mistake he could live with. They had him watch videos of how great pitchers with similar stuff profiles worked, and Gerrit Cole came up a lot.
“I think he knows who he is as a pitcher better now,” Teaford said. “He dove right into it and wanted to know all of that. The thing that was the most fun was watching him learn who he was.”
And while relief success could come with just his fastball and slider, all of Kopech’s work has been geared toward making him a sustainable starter, with a mechanical cleanup only solidifying everyone’s belief.
“His long-term projection for me definitely is a top end of the rotation starter,” Teaford said. “There might be some little nuances just having to face the order a few times more. But the dude’s got all the skills that you’d want to have in the starter.”
Starters have at least three pitches, and while trying to gain a feel for a changeup had been Kopech’s great mountain to climb as a prospect, Zaleski and Teaford wondered if there was an easier way sitting right in front of him. Kopech had re-introduced his curveball in Class AAA in 2018, but struggled to define a consistent shape for it. When Teaford looked at the Trackman data for him, he found the system grouped everything as a slider because the action on the two pitches was so similar. But now that they had him working more vertically, they felt the ability for a curve was there if they could just keep his hand over the top of the ball, and were willing to sacrifice some velocity to get the drop they wanted.
“He spins the crap out of the ball, so curveball seems like a good fit for him,” said Zaleski, who saw an easier path than teaching Kopech how to kill the velocity on his changeup. “Not to say that that was firm, but it was firmer than some of Teaford and my fastballs back in the day.”
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The initial ambition for Kopech’s 80-mph curveball was nothing more than a strike-stealing third pitch to expand his scouting report by showing hitters something with 1-to-7 movement, and help him get ahead of the count. But between instructional league 2019, spring training being shut down and not pitching in 2020, he’s really only had four active months working with a new grip and a straighter path to the plate. So when assessing where Kopech’s still latent upside lies, Teaford points to the curve, the best versions of which have only been seen in bullpens thus far.
A funny thing happened while focusing on a curveball as a third pitch: Zaleski and Teaford both feel Kopech is currently throwing the best changeups of his life. It’s in the low-90s, but boasts a bit more arm-side fade to counter not having great velocity separation from his fastball. And while his improvement came from intentional changes to his grip and finger pressure on the ball, relegating the pitch to something he could work on in the background rather than the most important thing he had to focus on in all of his outings, could be one of the biggest differences.
“Maybe not people talking about it,” Teaford said for what keyed his improvement. “I know you’re going to laugh, and that might be a bad answer. But I feel like he knew, just like, ‘You’ve got to throw a changeup, you’ve got to get a changeup, you’ve got to get to changeup.’ As far as Z and I were concerned, we’re like, yeah, you know, it’d be nice if you could get a feel for changeup but based on your breaking balls, we think there’s still three pitches in there, even if the change doesn’t come.”
Stepping back from scrutiny will not be a path to success for many parts of Kopech’s game going forward, since he remains one of the highest-ceiling pitchers in the organization. People understandably want to know what one of the most talented young pitchers in the sport was doing when he elected not to play last season and how long that decision will push back his ascent to the White Sox rotation.
Part of the answer is that by September 2020, he was talking to Teaford about getting back on a mound to start ramping up. He was talked out of going that quickly, but where other pitchers shut down over the offseason and then restart again, Kopech has been slowly building up his work since then so that spring training wouldn’t be a big, taxing jump in activity.
“He already had that itch,” Teaford said. “I think it put him in a good position to be ready to handle the season, so even though he didn’t get any innings last year, I think his body is in as good a position to handle a 160-game season as it could be.”
Even as Kopech makes his second start on Sunday, it’s another abbreviated affair in a measured plan by the organization to limit his innings in 2021 and avoid overtaxing him. And it’s necessary for the team to take charge on that end given the energy with which he’s returned to baseball. Despite his decision to step away from the game last year, Teaford and Zaleski knew from their work with Kopech since 2019 what kind of focus he would bring to his game when he came back.
“Everybody understands who he is,” Teaford said, “and what kind of person he is.”
(Photo: Kathryn Riley / Getty Images)