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Tyler Kepner’s here with his weekly Sliders column for a Windup takeover. Plus: Baseball card of the week! Let’s go:

Sinker Swim: A star born by … using his best pitch less?

José Soriano, the Angels ace, has an outstanding sinker. Last year, when he threw it more than any other qualified pitcher in the majors, he had a good season. This year, he is throwing it 20 percent less — and having the best season of any pitcher in the sport.

In four starts, he is 4-0 with a 0.33 ERA, allowing just one run and nine hits in 27 innings, with 31 strikeouts. Soriano has fanned 10 in each of his last two starts, while allowing no more than one run and three hits. The last Angel to do that in consecutive starts was Nolan Ryan in 1978.

Now Soriano, who starts tonight against the Padres, wants to do something Ryan never did: win the Cy Young Award. Only two Angels — Dean Chance in 1964 and Bartolo Colón in 2005 — ever have.

“That’s one of my goals, to win the Cy Young, and I think I started the right way,” Soriano said this week at Yankee Stadium.

• Last season, when he was 10-11 with a 4.26 ERA, almost everything he threw was down. He used his sinker about 50 percent of the time, mixing it mainly with curves, splitters and the occasional slider. Hitters looked down and stayed down.
• The four-seamer forces them to respect the high pitch, and now Soriano throws sinkers, four-seamers and curveballs in nearly equal ratios — all between 23 and 30 percent. 

He is reminding Kurt Suzuki, the new Angels manager, of two righties he once caught for the Washington Nationals: Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer.

Soriano, 27, signed with the Angels for $70,000 in 2016 and pitched well for four seasons until undergoing Tommy John surgery in January 2020. As he recovered, the Pirates took him first overall in the Rule 5 draft that December. After two games for Class A Bradenton in 2021, Soriano hurt his elbow again. He flew to Pittsburgh for a second Tommy John surgery and briefly considered quitting, leaning on family to help him through.

Had Soriano avoided the second surgery and pitched for Pittsburgh through the end of that 2021 season, he would probably still be a Pirate. But when the second operation made that impossible, the Pirates — in the spirit of the Rule 5 draft — returned him to the Angels after the season.

In the three-season span from 2020 through 2022, Soriano pitched only 16 2/3 innings. The Angels built him up as a reliever in 2023, and though he was wild, it was tempting to keep him on that path.

All those sinkers gave Soriano the best ground-ball rate in the American League from the time he reached the majors through the end of last season. Throwing fewer of them — while exploring the upper reaches of the strike zone, too — is making him a star.

More on Soriano in today’s full Sliders. Keep scrolling for more excerpts, after a quick interlude from Levi:

Baseball Card of the Week: 2026 Topps Now Ondřej Satoria

“There’s no cheering in the press box.”

That’s one of the first rules you learn when you start writing about baseball. But when Ondřej Satoria — an electrician from the Czech Republic — struck out Shohei Ohtani in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, I was not in a press box!

Czechia manager Pavel Chadim told me at this year’s winter meetings that Satoria had become something of a celebrity in his hometown. When the Czechs returned to Tokyo in 2026, the world discovered that the admiration didn’t stop at the country’s borders — Japanese fans adopted Satoria and the Czechs as their favorite underdogs.

Nobody really expected Satoria to outdo himself, but in Czechia’s final game — against prohibitive favorites Japan — the slow-balling changeup artist threw 4 2/3 scoreless innings and got a huge ovation when he walked off the field for the final time (he is retiring from the national team).

What an amazing story, and what an amazing moment. I’m not a big Topps Now guy, but I had to scoop this one.

Back over to Tyler.

Questions: Kimbrel on a path to Cooperstown?

When the Mets added Craig Kimbrel to their bullpen last weekend, manager Carlos Mendoza casually referred to him with the ultimate baseball superlative.

“He’s still got weapons and he’s here to help us,” Mendoza said. “This guy is well on his way to being a Hall of Famer.”

As a nine-time All-Star with 440 saves, ranking fifth on the career list, Kimbrel can certainly make a case. Then again, his production has been fairly ordinary for a while now. In his first eight seasons (2010 through 2017), Kimbrel had a 1.80 ERA and a 222 ERA+. In the next eight seasons, before joining the Mets, he had a 3.83 ERA and a 110 ERA+.

If Kimbrel does get to Cooperstown, though, he will set a modern record: most teams in a Hall of Fame career. The right-hander, who turns 38 next month, has pitched for the Braves, Padres, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Dodgers, Phillies, Orioles, Astros and the Mets.

That’s 10 teams, one more than modern record-holders Rickey Henderson and Goose Gossage. Only one Hall of Famer played for more teams than that duo, but you’ve got to go way back to find him.

Dan Brouthers suited up for 10 franchises from 1879 to 1896 — then added an 11th, in 1904, when John McGraw gave him a ceremonial cameo for the New York Giants at age 46. Brouthers, a first baseman, hit .342 in a career spent mostly with defunct franchises, including the Troy Trojans, Buffalo Bisons, Detroit Wolverines, Boston Reds, Louisville Colonels and the 1800s version of the Baltimore Orioles.

Classic Clip: Mike Scott’s ‘split-finger trash ball’

Split-finger fastball usage is up again this season, continuing a recent trend. Modern pitchers no longer fear the pitch of the 1980s, which fell out of favor for a generation in MLB (though not in Japan) over injury concerns.

Forty years ago, Mike Scott won a Cy Young Award for the Astros with a devastating splitter, part of a suspiciously lively repertoire that nearly carried Houston to the World Series. It’s been a rough start for today’s injury-ravaged Astros staff, which had an MLB-high 6.17 earned run average entering Thursday. Maybe they need more splitters.

Here’s a splitter-inspired public-service ad for the Texas Department of Transportation from 1986, the year Scott led the majors in ERA (2.22), innings (275 1/3) and strikeouts (306).

At first I was thrown off by the “M. SCOTT” on his jersey, since the Astros had only one player named Scott at the time. (They did have Tony Scott in 1984, so maybe Mike wore an old jersey for the shoot.) But I was really not prepared for Mike’s pitch to explode upon impact with the trash can.

Raging roadside fires would seem to be a more serious problem than littering. In the ’80s, though, it all made sense. You had to be there.

Again: Today’s newsletter is an adaptation of Tyler’s always-excellent Sliders column. See all his work here.

Handshakes and High Fives

Mike Trout hit his fifth home run in the Angels’ four-game series against the Yankees yesterday. Lately, as Ken Rosenthal writes, Trout has been sending a powerful reminder of his greatness.

Guardians starter Parker Messick came within three outs of ending MLB’s longest no-hitter drought last night against the Orioles. He settled for eight no-hit innings followed by two hits and two runs — and his ERA increased to 1.05.

The Padres’ sale process is nearing an end, reports Dennis Lin. An agreement between the Seidler family and a preferred bidder is expected as soon as early next week.

Somehow, the Dodgers are actually among MLB’s biggest overachievers this season. Chad Jennings dove into that and calculated the biggest underachievers, too.

The White Sox certainly aren’t winning on the field, but at least they’ve got another viral giveaway. Most-clicked in our last newsletter: Jackie Robinson Day uniform combos.

Most-clicked in our last newsletter: Jackie Robinson Day uniform combos.

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