In particular, we treat the Los Angeles Angels as a friend whose life is in crisis but there is nothing you can do about it because they will never ask for help and will never take advice. So you just check the AL West standings every now and then and feel a mixture of pity and helplessness.
Well you can take your compassion and push it, because as I write this the Angels are leading the way in separation. Tied for first place, one game over .500, but still significant. Just as Jo Adell’s three-run homer Saturday night grabbed headlines, and as Zach Neto’s four-run home run led the charge, there was one man driving the train: José Soriano.
Soriano is a good striker, but more than anything else he is a strange striker. He’s among the hardest-throwing players in the league, but his heavy hitter hasn’t missed many at-bats. In 2025, Soriano was second among qualified starters with four-seamer hits, behind only Paul Skenes. But he was just 46th of 52 in K-BB%.
Last year, I wrote about Soriano as one of the avatars of what is starting to look like a problem with the Angels’ system: They love speed, but their hard hitters aren’t hitting anyone. I say “starting to look like a systemic problem” as if I didn’t spend the middle of 2010 telling everyone who would listen that, no, I’m serious, this is going to be the year Garrett Richards stays healthy and wins the Cy Young Award.
In July, Jake Mailhot followed up with a detailed look at why Soriano struggled to get hitters out — a question made all the more confusing by the fact that each of his pitches produced more walks, or didn’t lead to more strikeouts.
Soriano throws five pitches: Sinker, four-seamer, curveball, splitter, and slider. The first three he throws to everyone, the divider is reserved for the opposite-handed batters and the slider for the same-handed batters. Last year, he was a sinker-curveball, and the splitter and slider came out later in the math.
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When I say Soriano is a weird pitcher, it’s not because of the types of pitches he uses, or the way he uses them. His five-tone mix is now also very orthodox. It’s weird because he throws hard enough to make the field labels look deceiving. Soriano’s curveball, for example, averaged 85.2 mph last year, making it one of the hardest hooks in the league. Some of the guys ahead of him, like Jhoan Duran and Jacob Misiorowski, only throw a curveball because we don’t know what else to call that crazy breaking pitch.
His curveball is also strange in its movement profile: The Kirkland Signature curveball will sink with little horizontal movement. The Soriano curve has moderate vertical movement but six inches of horizontal movement than normal. It’s one of the best curveballs in the league, designed for fast, to the point where if you call it a sweeper I don’t think anyone can see it. To put it that way, the Soriano of 2025 makes more sense: This is Eduard Bazardo and five miles an hour and a couple of showgrounds.
I’ve been accusing Soriano of giving him a little compliment for about 400 words now, so I feel obligated to say that his separator is really bad. I’ve already mentioned Duran and Skenes, and while his classifier isn’t quite at that level, it’s not too far off. Soriano is a throwback or a victim of outdated advice, in that he likes to connect to communicate with himself to act quickly. Even so, his sink produces many buckets.
Last season, there were 844 individual pitches (eg, Tanner Scott’s slider) that produced 50 or more batted balls. Soriano’s sinker has the seventh-highest groundball rate among those spots, at 74.0%. And because he threw the sinker in such high volume (1,368 times, or 49.1% of his total games), that made his sinker the major leaguer’s leading producer in big numbers: Opponents hit 242 grounders in Soriano’s pool last year, 51 more than Framber Valdez’s sinker. Only 23 stadiums have produced 100 ground balls in 2025.
I just want you to take a moment to visualize a quarter pitch higher than a bowling ball than Valdez’s sinker, which is itself one of the best ground breakers in sports. This is reflected in Soriano’s ground ball rate: 65.3% last year, the highest among starters (minimum 100 innings) by 6.2 percent.
That’s right, a pitcher with low strikeout and walk stats ends up with an impressive 3.73 FIP: Soriano basically doesn’t give up home runs.
In 2024 and 2025, that’s what Soriano was: a ground ball machine who threw a lot of innings. Like, what if Aaron Cook wore a radar gun? That’s a nice hole — Cook had several 3-WAR seasons and made an All-Star team — but it’s not an ace.
Let’s take a look at how things have played out in 2026: Soriano has pitched in six of the Angels’ wins so far this year, and while I don’t usually want to find meaning in that number, you have to say he got a W each time: Six innings and two hits against the Astros on Opening Day, then five days of the same.
On Monday, Soriano left a fastball to Drake Baldwin, who drove it into the right field seats for a solo homer, but that was all the damage. Soriano allowed just two more hits, and this time he pitched 10 over eight innings.
Our WAR has Soriano at 0.6 to three, which is good – repeat that over 33 starts and ends where Tarik Skubal did last year. And that’s what FIP is used for; Soriano walked six times and (ironically) allowed a home run. One run over 20 innings comes in an ERA of 0.45. Our RA9-WAR is 1.4 wins over replacement in just three starts.
As surprising as it is, I’m very reluctant to say anything based on a week and a half of games. (You can say it’s too early to jump to conclusions because of what I said earlier: The Angels are in first place as I write this.) A week into April, there may be one meaningful big-picture question that can be answered analytically: Is a given pitcher throwing something different compared to last year?
And in Soriano’s case, yes, he is. It’s five identical pitches, with more or less velocity, from the same arm angle. But he throws his four-seamer more: 22% of the time, up from 9% in 2025. He’s also getting more drops in his sink and splitter compared to last year.
In his article from last July, Jake pointed out that Soriano didn’t rush two strikes on the split man because he didn’t command enough. He hasn’t thrown enough time yet for us to learn much from the results, but every pitch he throws has been heavily chased, including the splitter. Soriano’s splitter rushing rate has doubled from last year.
Again, that’s probably a small sample, but if Soriano finally throws his four-seamer enough that hitters have to worry about it, it makes sense that they would get confused and give up the unknown sinker more often. I thought so.
Overall, Soriano’s pass rush rate increased by nearly half a year, from 26.7% in 2025 to 39.2% so far this season. And even though opponents are making more contact in the zone (and hitting the odd thing out of the zone), his contact rate is down 5.4% from last year.
Pitching trends — especially fastball usage trends — are cyclical. One year, for fashion designers, then four seamers up, then down, then down, skinny jeans, baggy jeans, punk, post-punk, pop-punk, post-punk revival… it’s hard to keep track. But this is the second I’ve written this week about finding success in the dungeon after adding his sink with the use of four ships. Great pitchers can always be successful in their chosen style, but guys like Soriano have to adapt.
If Soriano has truly found a new edge, and can get more wind and hustle without sacrificing quality ground ball production, this could be a fun year for him.
