Michael King could be really special, but this group of arms coming to San Diego via the Yankees’ trade for Juan Soto and Trent Grisham — which includes Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito and Randy Vásquez — is maybe most notable for its variance in styles, approaches and upsides. By collecting pitchers with different strengths, San Diego is virtually assured of at least producing a couple of mid-rotation arms cost-effectively. Each pitcher has their own set of ups and downs that demonstrate just how much beauty can be in the eye of the beholder when it comes to pitching assessment.

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The obvious headliner in the deal is King, who pretty much blew the door off the hinges in 2023 after being sidelined with an injury the year before. His ERA was fourth-best in baseball among pitchers with at least 100 innings, and he even cut his ERA to 2.23 as a starter in his last 40 innings, erasing some of the doubt on whether he has the arsenal to be an effective piece of the Padres’ rotation. Looking at process statistics only furthers that appraisal: He has really good stuff.

Stuff+, which evaluates pitchers using only the physical characteristics of their pitches, shows that among those with 100+ innings pitched, King had:

• An 80th percentile four-seam fastball
• A 95th percentile two-seam fastball
• The fourth-best slider
• A 45th percentile changeup
• The 14th-best overall Stuff+

That’s a beautiful slider, and yes … it’s a sweeper. Because of a whopping 18 inches of horizontal break, this pitch had the 12th-best whiff rate among sweepers that were thrown at least 50 times last year.

While King’s changeup has less drop than average and a below-average velocity gap off of his fastball, he locates the pitch better than 85 percent of the league. His heat map reveals an ability to keep it down and away from lefties with the best in the league.

That’s why hitters hit only .100 off the pitch last season, and part of why King can be a starter.

The biggest question is how much of a starter he can be. Last year’s 104 2/3 innings was the most he’d put up since 2017’s 149, and he’s suffered some significant injuries recently. The biggest, most recent one was fairly gruesome, as he fractured the tip of his elbow. Before that, he had a stress reaction in his elbow, and the Yankees have been cautious with his workload, limiting him to fewer than 80 pitches in six of his nine starts last season. He held his velocity and stuff even as he expanded his pitch count, but his injury history is probably part of why he was even available to be a part of this trade.

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The other major-league names don’t wow by surface-level results in the same way but do have some intriguing aspects.

Brito looks like he has four average-ish pitches and above-average command when it comes to his movement and velocity. Not surprisingly, his strikeout rate last year was below average, and his walk rate was better than average. If Brito ends up better than expected, it’s because he can use that command and wide arsenal to play with the batter’s expectations, and perhaps because his good horizontal movement could be coached into more groundballs. He’s had ground-ball rates as high as 56 percent in the minors but was down at league average (44 percent) in 2023.

Maybe most importantly for a team that’s looking to replace a whopping 700 innings lost to free agency, Brito should be able to post frames for the Padres. Since he broke the 100-inning barrier in 2019 — and then missed the 2020 season — he’s slowly ramped up to the 127 innings he put up last year with only two short trips to the injured list scattered throughout. He did have Tommy John in 2017, but it’s a relatively clean bill of health for a starting pitcher.

Vásquez had below-average strikeout, walk and ground-ball rates, but that isn’t quite fair as a be-all and end-all description of his abilities. He threw five pitch types last year, and only the cutter rated as below-average by Stuff+. His changeup has plus drop and fade and was his best pitch by results, as batters hit .100 and slugged .300 off the pitch despite the hitter-friendly ballpark. It looks the part of a put-away pitch.

Vásquez doesn’t have the command Brito does, but it’s not on the level that it’s a problem, and if he can tweak any of his breaking pitches to match the excellence of his changeup, he does have the ability to take a step forward and surprise despite his poor peripherals from 2023. He also should be able to push 150 innings.

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Thorpe was only 16th on Keith Law’s preseason Yankees prospect list due to some possible fastball issues, but he ran through two levels this year, striking out over a third of the batters he saw. He was one of only three prospects in the minor leagues to throw at least 80 innings and have peripherals as good as he had this past year. While the fastball velocity isn’t plus, he touched the mid-90s this year and has good vertical ride, plus a visually pleasing changeup that is a legitimate out pitch.

Drew Thorpe highlights he has a nasty changeup

— Giannis Auntiegotapoodle (@TooMuchMortons_) December 6, 2023

Thorpe also continues the running theme with the secondary arms in this trade: he put up 139 1/3 innings last year and shouldn’t have a problem crossing the 150-inning threshold, though it is an open question of how ready he is to do the bulk of those in the major leagues right away, considering he was just drafted in 2022.

The Padres may still have to add some innings from the free-agent market — 700 is a big number to replace — but at the very least, they seem to have gotten a group of arms that (other than King) have shown the capability to eat up innings. While King leads with the most upside and could be a legitimate top-of-the-rotation starter in a full healthy season, and while the other three have their flaws, Brito, Vásquez, and Thorpe all have intriguing aspects of their own, and at the very least will provide optionable depth if the Padres’ other young minor-league pitchers pass them as they improve.

(Photo of Michael King: Rich Storry / USA Today)