Ex-Yankee Michael King has become solid starter for Padres

Michael King has turned into exactly the kind of starting pitcher the Yankees thought he would.

It was for that reason that when they were in trade talks with the Padres regarding outfielder Juan Soto during the 2023 winter meetings, the Yankees tried as hard as they could to steer San Diego general manager A.J. Preller away from King.

Someone, anyone other than King.

But the inclusion of the righthander was a must for Preller, and eventually the trade was consummated. The Yankees received Soto and Trent Grisham and the Padres got King, fellow righthanders Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito and Randy Vasquez and catcher Kyle Higashioka.

After somewhat of a slow start last season, King, who will try to beat his former team Tuesday night when he squares off against Clarke Schmidt at the Stadium, finished 13-9 with a 2.95 ERA in 31 games (30 starts).

King, who even as a highly successful multi-innings reliever for the Yankees never hid his desire to be a front-of-the-rotation starter in the big leagues, brings a 4-1 record with a 2.09 ERA in seven starts into Tuesday night.

For the uber-confident King, now 29, it has been the fulfillment of exactly what he thought he would be, too.

“Reassuring, I’d say,” he said late Monday afternoon of his journey to this point. “I knew in ’20 and ’21 when I got a couple of starts that I was not good enough to be a starter. Like, I had a sinker, and that’s it. Seeing other pitchers in the league and the other four or five guys that were in our rotation at the time, they were head and shoulders better than me.”

One of those pitchers was ace Gerrit Cole, who came to the Yankees as a free agent before the 2020 season. From the time he joined the club, Cole has mentored pretty much every pitcher in pinstripes, and he took a particular interest in King.

That only increased toward the end of the Yankees’ lost 2023 season — they went 82-80 and missed the playoffs — when King was given an opportunity to start. He took full advantage, posting a 1.88 ERA in eight starts.

“Michael’s got every trait you want out of a starter,” Cole, who won the AL Cy Young Award in 2023, said during that season’s final week. “He’s got [everything]. Four pitches. The preparation, command, off-speed, the fastball. We have to get him now to 170 innings, that’s our goal. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. He’s thrown 160 in the minor leagues for us, just not at this level. That’s the only thing he’s left to prove. Obviously he can do it, obviously he can dominate. You have to do it every week. You have to do it 1 1⁄2 times a week for six months.”

The byproduct of King’s electric eight-start stretch to end ’23 was teams such as the Padres taking note, to the extent that they simply would not budge when it came to King — who grew up a Yankees fan in Rhode Island — being the centerpiece of the Soto deal.

As Aaron Boone put it shortly after the trade went through: “In a lot of ways, [we were] trying to keep Michael King out of the deal.”

Speaking before Monday night’s game, Boone said King has become “a beast” as a starter.

“He’s become everything you would have hoped for and that he kind of showed us here through dominating in the pen to finally getting in the rotation,” Boone said. “And now he’s gone and done it over a full season, and now done it with the volume, too. I can’t say I’m surprised. Talking about weapons, he’s got a lot of weapons to beat you.”

Would King’s developmental trajectory have been the same had he stayed with the Yankees?

“I don’t know. I’d like to think so,” the always amiable but blunt King said Monday. “I know that I was at least getting treated like I was going to come in as a starter in 2024 had the trade not happened. But you have no idea. They have a ton of talent over there that has emerged in Luis Gil and Clarke and obviously going out and getting [Max] Fried. So you have no idea, but I’m very happy with where I’m at.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.