Erick Fedde's long, strange and sometimes ugly baseball journey lands him his biggest gig yet with Cardinals

When the Chicago White Sox signed Erick Fedde to a two-year, $15 million deal during last December’s Winter Meetings, the gambit was fairly apparent. A rebuilding White Sox team turned to the right-hander who had spent 2023 starring in the Korean Baseball Organization with hopes that he could stabilize a rotation in dire need of veteran reinforcements.

It was a sizable commitment to a pitcher who had yet to prove his new form against the big-league competition that knocked him around early in his career, but if his reintegration into the major leagues went well, he could prove to be a valuable trade chip come July.

While the White Sox collectively turned out to be far worse than anyone anticipated, Fedde individually held up his end of the bargain beyond even the most optimistic projections. He didn’t just come in and munch innings on a bad team; Fedde has demonstrated that the adjustments he made that enabled winning league MVP for the KBO’s NC Dinos are also effective against MLB's best hitters. He might not be leading his entire league in wins (20), ERA (2.00), WHIP (0.95) and strikeouts (209) like he did with the Dinos last year, but Fedde has been rock-solid for Chicago, ranking 10th among AL starters in fWAR (2.7) and ninth in ERA (3.11).

In simple terms, even one of the worst teams in baseball history had a chance to win when Fedde took the mound: At 7-4, he was the only White Sox pitcher with a winning record.

As expected, when the July 30 trade deadline neared, rumors about Fedde’s potential next team gained traction. He was a logical target for several contenders, not just for what he could bring down the stretch but also as a valuable rotation piece moving forward, considering his modest $7.5 million salary for 2025. Ultimately, St. Louis scooped him up in a three-way trade in which the Los Angeles Dodgers sent three young players to Chicago to facilitate landing utilityman Tommy Edman from the Cardinals. Fedde will make his Cardinals debut Friday against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field in a classic rivalry game in the thick of a frantic NL wild-card push for St. Louis. With all due respect to the Dinos’ push for the KBO playoffs a year ago, each Fedde start for the remainder of the season will carry more weight than any prior outing of his career.

While anyone who returns to the big leagues after playing abroad tends to garner a journeyman label, Fedde’s career until last year had actually followed a fairly straightforward path. He grew up in Las Vegas, where he was teammates with Bryce Harper as early as T-ball and all the way up through high school. Both went on to become first-round draft picks by the Nationals: Harper as the first overall pick in 2010 out of a Nevada junior college and Fedde in 2014 out of UNLV. Fedde entered his junior year with a strong chance of being a top-10 pick, but an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery dropped him to the 18th pick.

He moved fairly quickly through the minors upon return from surgery and made his big-league debut in 2017.

Then Fedde struggled to seize a consistent role on the veteran-laden Nationals roster. Although he appeared in 21 games for the 2019 team that went on to win it all, he was not included on any of the postseason rosters. Still, he had shown enough to warrant a more extended look moving forward, and as the Nationals descended stunningly quickly into a rebuild following their World Series title, Fedde finally got consistent run in the rotation.

It didn’t go well. An arsenal that worked wonders against collegiate and minor-league competition was not good enough against big-league bats every fifth day. Neither Fedde's four-seam nor his two-seam fastball had enough velocity to overpower opponents, and none of his secondary offerings elicited nearly enough whiff or chase to be effective. While Fedde didn’t explicitly struggle with control, his lack of a true out pitch forced him to fall repeatedly into hitter’s counts, leading to either free passes or a ton of hard contact — or a vicious combination of the two. It was a troubling recipe, and the results reflected as much.

Among 76 starting pitchers who threw at least 300 innings from 2020 to 2022, Fedde ranked among the very worst:

• 1.3 fWAR (75th)

• 5.42 ERA (74th)

• 5.10 FIP (76th)

• 1.51 WHIP (74th)

• 8.8% K-BB% (73rd)

It was no surprise then — not even to Fedde — the Nationals non-tendered him following the 2022 season. He knew he hadn’t pitched well enough to guarantee a roster spot for 2023, and he was ready to attack the winter head-on in an effort to turn his career around. Having dealt with a shoulder injury in 2022 that sapped some of his velocity, his priorities were to get healthy and alter his arsenal in a way that could prove more reliable against the best hitters on Earth — something the Nationals had failed to help him cultivate.

“I needed a swing-and-miss pitch,” Fedde told Yahoo Sports in an interview last month, “and I needed something to get people off my heater.”

Even before the Nationals officially non-tendered him in November, Fedde was in search of solutions. He moved to Arizona, where he started working out and throwing bullpens at a facility in Tempe where several other big-league pitchers train. Without plus velocity, the key for Fedde was to find new secondary weapons that would play well off of his low-90s sinker.

The first addition was a sweeper thrown harder and with more horizontal movement than the traditional curveball, at 78-80 mph, that had been woefully ineffective with the Nationals. It was a new pitch for Fedde but also one he believes he picked up especially quickly since it’s not too dissimilar from the slider that was his go-to secondary pitch in college, before the elbow injury. He also focused on reintroducing a changeup that had largely disappeared from his repertoire by the end of his tenure in Washington.

His new arsenal was quickly coming together behind the scenes; it was then just a matter of where he’d be pitching.

While several MLB teams were interested in buying low on the former first-rounder with a minor-league deal and an invite to major-league camp to compete for a spot, Fedde was focused on the bigger picture. Rather than head to camp with a big-league team and hope he could stand out among a bevy of pitchers in similar situations, a different opportunity piqued Fedde’s interest: a guaranteed seven-figure deal to front a rotation overseas.

The chance to apply his offseason work over a full season in a highly competitive environment where he didn’t have to stress about being shuttled back and forth between the minors and majors was appealing. And so, before the new year, Fedde agreed to a $1 million deal with the Dinos. He was off to the other side of the world to see how his new stuff would translate against actual hitters, and not just in indoor bullpen sessions.

And translate it did.

Fedde authored a marvelous season in South Korea, and most importantly, he did it in 180 innings across 30 starts — career highs in both categories. As planned, he then returned stateside with substantially more interest from MLB clubs in bringing him in on a big-league deal. And when it came time to decide, it wasn’t only about which team offered him the most money. In addition to a strong deal financially, Chicago offered Fedde a near-certain rotation spot that wasn’t a guarantee elsewhere.

Just as he did a year earlier, Fedde jumped at the best chance for him to pitch as much as possible. And it turned out to be a great fit.

Even amid all the losing, Fedde is grateful for Chicago’s trust in him to make the jump back to the big leagues and prove that his pre-KBO self is in the distant past. Furthermore, he believes he has continued to only improve since returning to MLB.

“I give a lot of credit to [White Sox pitching coach Ethan Katz] and them,” Fedde said. "They helped me evolve my pitchability and pitch selection.

“We talk about how to make the plate feel as big as possible,” he said, suggesting that his younger self struggled to feel confident filling up the zone because none of his pitches was good enough to get guys out consistently. Though he still leans heavily on his sinker and cutter, just as he did when he was floundering with the Nationals, the addition of the sweeper and changeup have made his primary pitches far more effective in contrast.

2022 pitch usage:

• 40% sinker (94 mph average)

• 29% curveball (78 mph)

• 28% cutter (89 mph)

• 4% changeup (86 mph)

2024 pitch usage:

• 31% cutter (90 mph)

• 30% sinker (93 mph)

• 20% sweeper (84 mph)

• 19% changeup (88 mph)

“I have way more tools in my belt,” Fedde said. “I was trying to hammer in nails with a screwdriver for a long time.”

Now armed with a much more well-rounded arsenal, he is finally fulfilling the promise he had a decade ago as a top draft pick. Having departed the worst team in baseball to join a Cardinals squad eager to reassert its status as a National League contender, the stakes are suddenly raised significantly, giving Fedde a new platform on which to prove himself further.

His comeback story is already a good one, but it is also very much unfinished.