Davis Martin went back home for the All-Star break, where he reworked his mechanics – Sox Machine

In his last start, Davis Martin gave up four runs in six innings against the Yankees, spiking his season ERA to its highest point (3.61) since the beginning of April.

He also regards it as one of his top three favorite outings of the year. Weathering a first inning four-spot to deliver five scoreless frames afterward in a wild, eventual 12-inning comeback win is the sort of show of resilience that starting pitchers romanticize. Superficially, Martin has a 4.68 ERA over three starts since the All-Star break, but a 14-4 K-BB ratio has him adamant that his delivery mechanics have been trending in the right direction over that span.

“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.”

After his last start before the All-Star break, Martin allowed that the fatigue built up over his 100 1/3 first half innings was affecting his delivery, but shot down the notion that it was still a factor in his sixth inning from hell against the Astros last month, and said those issues had been addressed.

It seems that when he said he would cope with the sting of missing out on the All-Star Game by traveling back to his home in Oklahoma and going fishing with his son, Doak, Martin was underselling his plans for the break. PitchingWRX, the private facility that Martin trains at in the offseason, and which his former White Sox teammate Lane Ramsey helps run, is located in Oklahoma City. Where in-season bullpen sessions between starts have to be limited in reps to avoid tiring him out for his next outing, Martin felt he had more space to iron out changes during the break.

“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.'” said Martin, who was able to try a host of different cues before finding something that clicked. “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.”

Martin has hovered more in the 93-94 mph velocity band with his four-seamer since the break, after averaging 95 mph in a few outings during his dominant May. But his quibbles with his performance have always centered around command, walks, missing horizontally and rotating side-to-side too much in his delivery.

“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,” said Sox pitching coach Zach Bove. “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.”

Speaking to players in August really drives home how many mechanical fixes — for both pitchers and hitters — are really just addressing movements that have slowly drifted out of place over the course of thousands of practice and game reps. Injury and pain tend to be the most dramatic catalysts for mechanical drift, but struggle can initiate it too; even success.

Martin’s been aware of his tendency to over-rotate in his delivery for a while now, to the point that he already had a built-in cue for trying to counteract it. For most of this season, it worked better than ever. Now he finds himself trying to reverse having over-corrected his delivery.

“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,” said Martin, 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.”

So part of Martin’s reverence for his last outing is the understanding that corrections are the inevitable and constant work of this sport. Especially in the physical war of attrition of an 162-game season, every good habit can become a bad one with enough time.

“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.”