Soroka to Maricopa on One-Year Deal

Michael Soroka is getting another chance to start. Bright and early on Monday morning, Jesse Rogers and Jeff Passan of ESPN kicked off the Winter Meetings with news that the right-handed former sinkerballer has agreed to a one-year deal with the Diamondbacks. Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic reported that the deal is for one year and $7.5 million, along with up to $2 million in incentives. Soroka slots into a new team as a starter for the second year in a row after struggling in the rotation and then pitching better out of the bullpen. He’ll now do so for a Diamondbacks team in desperate need of starting pitching, as both Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly have entered free agency. It’s a small gamble on a pitcher whose upside isn’t necessarily set in stone.

Still just 28, Soroka has already walked a long road. The Braves’ first-round pick out of high school in 2015, he debuted in 2018 at the age of 20. He dominated in 2019, going 13-4 with a 2.68 ERA and 3.45 FIP, and finishing second in the Rookie of the Year voting and sixth in the Cy Young voting. A sinkerballer by trade, he ran a 51% groundball rate and allowed just 0.72 homers per nine innings. He was one of the most promising young arms in the game. Then he tore his Achilles tendon in both 2020 and 2021 and followed those up with shoulder injuries. From 2020 to 2023, he made just 10 major league appearances, missing the 2021 and 2022 seasons entirely.

A trade sent Soroka to the White Sox for the 2024 season, and he was a different pitcher there. After running a 6.39 ERA and 6.76 FIP over nine starts, he got sent to the bullpen in May and essentially ditched the sinker, which ran a .399 wOBA on the year. His ERA and FIP both improved to 2.75 in the bullpen, striking out an absurd 15 batters per nine innings. He allowed just 0.75 homers per nine, even though he was leading with his four-seamer and slider and running a below-average groundball rate.

The Nationals bought low, signing Soroka for one year and plugging him back into the rotation. He stuck with what had worked in 2024, sort of. He stayed away from the sinker, throwing the four-seamer over 45% of the time. He also ditched the slider for a slower, bendier slurve and threw it nearly 35% of the time. It didn’t work out, but it was good enough to interest a contender. Soroka ran a 4.86 ERA and 4.25 FIP over 17 starts, the last of which came as a member of the Cubs after a deadline deal. Once again, Soroka finished the season in the bullpen and on a roll, going 6 1/3 scoreless innings as a reliever with a 3.92 FIP (before finally giving up a couple of runs in the playoffs). In all, 2025 wasn’t disastrous. Soroka’s ERA and FIP were pretty close to the league average, and his DRA- of 90 was significantly better than average. He earned a shot somewhere, and Arizona could definitely use the help.

The Diamondbacks rotation was right around the middle of the pack in 2025, ranking 19th with a 4.29 ERA and 16th with a 4.21 FIP. More importantly, Gallen and Kelly provided more than a third of the team’s innings pitched and WAR by starters. That’s a huge hole to fill if Arizona doesn’t retain the two pitchers, and even if everything goes miraculously and Soroka pitches a full season as a starter for the first time since 2019, he will only be plugging half of it. No wonder the Diamondbacks are jumping into the starting pitching market early. If Gallen and Kelly leave, Arizona would be losing two guys on our Top 50 Free Agents list and replacing them with one guy who isn’t; adding Soroka alone won’t be enough, especially because there’s some speculation that the plan is to move Soroka to the bullpen once Corbin Burnes returns from Tommy John a few months into the season. That said, if Soroka can deliver something like his 2025 performance – even if you throw out those handful of scoreless relief outings – he can still be a valuable piece. All teams, even those with playoff ambitions, need league-average innings, and over just 16 starts in Washington, Soroka was tied for third on the team with 1.2 WAR. He’s a solid, low-risk addition, and he may well have more in the tank. He’s only 28, and it’s hard to know what he’ll look like if and when he’s fully healthy.

To that point, there’s one more question that remains to be answered. Will the Diamondbacks want Soroka to bring back the sinker? Although he didn’t throw it much, Soroka’s sinker looked different, and quite possibly better, in 2025. It’s not necessarily a slam dunk. His arm slot dropped and he traded some vertical movement for horizontal, causing it to be a flatter pitch, which is not what you want when you throw a sinker. The pitch generated a minuscule 5% whiff rate and an ugly 50% hard-hit rate. Those are all bad things. But its velocity ticked up to 93.4 mph, the highest it had ever been, and that jump wasn’t associated with his time in the bullpen. By run value, the sinker was his second-best pitch, behind the slurve. Stuff+ and PitchingBot liked the sinker better than they had in years. Lastly, the pitch had a 61% groundball rate, and if Soroka can keep that going, the other numbers won’t matter all that much.

To be clear, this is a small sample, both because Soroka didn’t throw that many innings and because he threw the sinker just 10% of the time. It’s just a possibility, and one that the Diamondbacks may not even be interested in. If anybody out there thought Soroka could turn into the 2019 version of himself, his contract would contain a lot more years and a lot more zeroes. Still, it’s an intriguing possibility, especially for a pitcher whose home mound will now be in front of one of the league’s largest outfields. Statcast’s park factors have Chase Field as the most triples-happy and second-most doubles-happy park in the game. Finding out whether Soroka can regain the groundball magic isn’t just intriguing; it could be the key to whether he’s able to succeed in Arizona. If he can’t, though, the Diamondbacks can always just move him back to the bullpen. That usually works out.