Davis Martin didn’t treat the All-Star break like a vacation so much as a reset button.
The White Sox right-hander went back to Oklahoma and spent part of the time at PitchingWRX in Oklahoma City, the private training facility he uses in the offseason and where former White Sox teammate Lane Ramsey helps run things. That extra runway mattered. Instead of the short bullpen work he’d have between starts during the season, Martin got a full 35-pitch session to sort through the mechanical drift he’d been feeling.
“Just had a 35-pitch bullpen where you can really like hammer stuff out, talk, have those conversations, and not be like 'I'm starting in two days, so I need to keep it short.'” Martin said. “Alex [Marney] and Lane finally as we go toward the end of it said, 'Hey, try this feel,' I was like, 'That's it,' and it was just like bam, bam, bam, bam, executing pitches, feeling back in sync, not having to think about it.”
That work showed up in the way he’s looked since the break. Martin has a 4.68 ERA over three starts, but he’s pointing to the 14-4 K-BB ratio as the better reflection of where things stand. In his view, the delivery is starting to come back together.
“Over the course of 17 or innings or whatever it is [16 2/3], you can really look at just two innings where things went astray,” Martin said. “The other 15 innings, and they're crisp, they're clean.
We're striking guys out, we're getting ahead of guys, we're staying ahead of guys, we're throwing multiple pitches in spots. All those things start syncing back up, and it just gives me the confidence to feel like we're back mechanically.
We feel good. We're executing pitches when we need to execute them.
That's kind of my two cents.”
His last outing before the break was a rough one on the surface - four runs in six innings against the Yankees, pushing his ERA to 3.61, its highest mark since the beginning of April. But Martin still counts it as one of his three favorite starts of the season, because he absorbed a first-inning four-spot and then held the line for five scoreless frames in a wild game the White Sox eventually won in 12 innings.
That kind of outing fit the theme of what Martin has been chasing: getting back to a cleaner delivery, and trusting the ball will follow.
He had already said after his final start before the break that the fatigue from 100 1/3 first-half innings had affected his mechanics, though he pushed back on the idea that it was still lingering in his sixth inning from hell against the Astros last month. He said those issues had been addressed.
Martin’s fastball has sat more in the 93-94 mph range since the break, after he averaged 95 mph in a few outings during his dominant May. But for him, the bigger issue has never been velocity. It’s been command, walks, missing horizontally and spinning side to side too much in his delivery.
Sox pitching coach Zach Bove said Martin used the trip home as a chance to reset and clean up some physical pieces of the delivery that had gotten out of sync.
“He goes home, throws a pen at his old facility, working on some things there, and there's some physical components of the delivery that are a little out of sync, but he also just used that as reset,” Bove said. “It's the setup of the posture, just making sure he's like, vertical, upright.
That gets him in that north-south plane, more linear. If the setup, the first move is good, that sets up the rotation that we get.”
Martin knows the feeling well. He’s been aware of his tendency to over-rotate for a while, and he already had a cue he’d used to fight it. This season, that cue worked better than ever - until he started pushing it too far the other way.
“The fix was me getting taller, so I kept doing that, and it almost got to the extreme, and I'm like almost nowhere close to where I was,” Martin said, miming out how he slowly went from too hunched over, to forcing himself standing upright, to almost leaning back. “The fix I was get tall because I was getting too far forward.
And so then I was too tall, and I'm still trying to get too tall. So it was like two ends of the spectrum, and I was just pushing one side too far.”
That’s why the break mattered. In Martin’s view, this sport is a constant cycle of small adjustments, and over a long season even a good habit can turn into a problem if it keeps drifting.
“It’s just one little change, and then it just keeps snowballing a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and you think everything's going fine, and then all of a sudden you're just out of luck,” Martin said. “It's interesting, obviously the second half of my fourth season, this is just going to be a thing that you're going to have to accept that it's going to happen at some point. The more you can log it and get experience and you'll be able to nip those things in the bud faster and faster and faster as the years go on.”
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