PEORIA, Ariz. — Miles Mikolas has parlayed his three-year stay with Yomiuri in Nippon Professional Baseball into more than $49 million guaranteed. Merrill Kelly, Chris Flexen and Pierce Johnson, too, are among the arms who've breathed new life into their careers in either Japan or Korea.
So Nick Martinez was certainly hopeful as he passed on a number of split contracts to pack him and his pregnant wife, Kimberly, off to Sapporo, Japan, in 2018. Yet he'd largely treaded water with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters until the pandemic enticed him to truly look inward for change.
"It's kind of hard to pitch," Martinez admitted, "when you're not where your feet are, when you're not focused on what you're doing."
Martinez's feet are in a good spot these days, back in a big-league clubhouse, back in the States as he and his wife, Kimberly, prepare to welcome a second child in August and perhaps leading, by virtue of a new deal worth at least $25.5 million, the race for the fifth spot in the Padres' rotation.
Sure, Chris Paddack, Ryan Weathers and MacKenzie Gore remain in contention, but the front office's confidence in Martinez's about-face in Japan is evident in its willingness to not tack on a $2 million signing bonus onto this year's $4 million salary, but award him $6.5 million player options for each of the next three seasons.
"He's always been a really good athlete and he's always been a guy who's a strike-thrower and has multiple weapons," Padres President of Baseball Operations A.J. Preller said. "I think what we've seen in Japan is the stuff's gotten better — the fastball velocity and the quality of his breaking pitches. He's got four real pitches."
Preller would know.
He was in the front office in 2011 when the Texas Rangers drafted Martinez in the 18th-round out of Fordham as a pitcher, forecasting a brighter future on the mound after watching him slug .376 over three years as an infielder.
Of course, Preller had moved on to San Diego well before Martinez, optioned 13 times in four years and finally non-tendered in December 2017 with a 4.77 ERA over 415 career innings in the majors, came to a crossroads: Fight his way back to the majors on a minor league deal or accept and make a healthy living for him and his budding family on a $1.8 million deal with the Ham Fighters.
"I was weighing a lot of split deals," Martinez recalled. "I felt like I was labeled as a 'depth guy,' and I didn't like that label. I know what I can do. I know what I'm capable of. I wanted to shake that label, so career-wise it was an opportunity because guys that had success in Japan were coming back over and getting deals."
Yet Martinez was siting on one solid season (3.51 ERA) with the Ham Fighters and an injury-riddled 2019 when the pandemic forced him into looking for more productive ways to pass the time than Call of Duty.
Enter Martinez's head-first dive into pitching analytics.
From the comfort of his apartment in Japan, Martinez became certified in pitch design via both Driveline and Rapsodo's online courses. He'd already spent some time at Driveline's Kent, Wash., campus, whetting his appetite to improve his pitching across the board.
What Martinez learned was eye-opening.
"If there was any way that I could get better, I wanted to try," Martinez said. "As a middle infielder I tried to be athletic on the mound and by being athletic I thought I had good mechanics. But the biomechanics review really exposed that I had some inefficiencies. I was leaking and losing power."
Regaining that power began from the ground up, shifting him from a quad-dominant pitcher to one who was able to ride his back hip to ensure his push foot was connected to the ground as long as possible. As he cleaned that up, he turned to the metrics to begin improving the spin on his fastball and curveball and ultimately all his pitches, leading him to forgo a healthy diet of sinkers and sliders while with the Rangers to featuring four-seamers.
Then again, Martinez notes, "If I'm living right, I'm coming at you with everything."
The tinkering continued once the lockout was lifted — he had a 4.23 ERA over 83 innings in 2020 as felt his way through that season — but the new-look Martinez wasn't fully revealed until after signing a one-year deal with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks for the 2021 season.
With his fastball pushing 94 mph, up from 90 mph in his early days with the Rangers, an improved change-up and better spin on his breaking balls, Martinez struck out 146 batters against 39 walks and posted a 1.62 ERA over 149 2/3 innings. The stint was interrupted by striking out 16 over a team-high 11 innings of two-run ball during Team USA's silver medal run during the Olympics, putting Martinez squarely back on big-league radars.
Preller's Padres were certainly watching.
Now they're banking on the Rangers' old castaway.
"I think the stuff has gotten better," Preller said. "But the other thing is he's also done it every five to seven days in Japan in the rotation, getting it done in front of big crowds, in big stadiums as a front-of-the-rotation guy there. I think that adds to people's confidence. That first time in the states, he's coming in as kind of that extra guy just trying to hang on.
"I know it's a different league in a different country … but I think all those things add up to him being a different pitcher than he was the first time he was here."
This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.
