NEW YORK — In his third start of the season, his third start in the major leagues after two years of self-imposed exile in Japan, Anthony Kay shut the Royals down into the sixth inning. As a calling card, you might say, Kay clipped Jac Caglianone’s elbow with a fastball, his final pitch of the night.
Caglianone stared, said something as he walked to first base. Kay stared back. “Those guys like to chirp a little bit, it seems like,” Kay told reporters following that April 9 game. “I don’t think we’re going to take that anymore. We’re going to go right at them.”
There was a message there, for certain, the kind of message teams send about when they are no longer resigned to losing; will no longer allow hitters to dig in, crowd the plate, swing from the heels with impunity. The White Sox, one of the worst teams in baseball history in 2024, finishing 41-121, started to turn a corner late last season, but still finished 60-102.
Now, they were going to be a different team, with a different culture, different attitude in 2026. They were 38-33 and tied for first place with in the AL Central with Cleveland after Tuesday’s series-opening 12-2 loss to the Yankees. Despite the blip, Kay (6-1), the lefthander from UConn who starts Wednesday night’s game for Chicago, has been one of the reasons behind the dramatic resurgence. How dramatic? In 2024, while Kay was pitching for Yokohama, the White Sox had already lost 120 games before getting win No. 38.
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The plunk-and-staredown with Caglianone was not an isolated incident. Kay has hit 12 betters, most in the majors, in his first 66 1/3 innings. “I pitch inside a lot,” Kay said Tuesday, in the visiting clubhouse at Yankee Stadium. “Some of them are breaking balls, I hit the guy’s foot. Some of that is sort of unlucky, in a way, that’s kind of how it is.”
It has a familiar ring back in Storrs, where he was the Huskies’ ace and set a tone for bulldogged-ness.
“When he gets on the mound, you know, he’s out there to compete, he’s not out there to make friends,” UConn pitching coach Josh MacDonald said, “He’s not out there to fool around.”
Anthony Kay has been through too much since he left UConn in 2016, as a late first-round draft pick by the Mets, to fool around. He needed Tommy John surgery before he began his pro career, and as he began to rise in the Mets system, he was traded to Toronto. The Jays used him mostly as a reliever, and he bounced up and down from the minor leagues, to the Cubs and the Mets, before packing up and moving 7,000 miles from his Long Island home to Japan, where he was allowed to start, allowed to figure things out. In his second year with Yokohama, he was 9-6 with a 1.74 ERA. enough to earn a fresh look from MLB. He signed a two-year, $12 million contract to pitch on Chicago’s South Side.
“I wanted to start again, I had a great opportunity to go over there and do my thing,” Kay said. “I got comfortable over there, learned the sinker over there, and it’s helped me a lot. I regained a lot of confidence in myself, everything, really, is totally different mentally and physically than I was when I was over here before.”
In Japan’s major leagues, Kay was in a world where the premium was not on strikeouts, though he had 130 in 155 innings last year, but on inducing soft contact and getting outs earlier in the counts and working deeper into games. He had one of the best ground-ball to fly-ball ratios in Japan, and with good health and mechanics he ticked his fastball up to 95 MPH.
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“Over there, they want you to throw 100-120 pitches,” Kay said. “They want you going into the seventh, eighth inning. Guys around the league, they all threw multiple fastballs, four-seam, two-seam, cutter. I feel (the two-seamer) was the one pitch I was missing. One day, I gripped it and threw it and the metrics were really good on it. My first year, the playoffs came around and I leaned on it a little more, and that led to the massive ground ball ratio my second year and the success I had.”
In his first 14 starts, Kay has kept the White Sox in every game but two, rough outings against the Phillies and Diamondbacks inflated his ERA to 4.34 going into his start against the Yankees, when he expected to have at least 25 friends and relatives from Long Island, and his old college pitching coach, in the stands. Take out those two starts, and Kay’s ERA in all the other games is 2.76.
“Kay is awesome,” White Sox manager Will Venable said. “He’s very competitive, he’s finding different ways to be successful. He’s gone through some real challenges, and I think even within each game there have been challenges. He’s a very resilient guy. He is one of the guys on our pitching staff, he, Davis Martin, are setting a tone of going out there and being fearless, going out there and attacking, and it may not always be pretty, may not always be what they set out to do, but they’re getting it done.”
Before starting his pro career, lefty Anthony Kay parlayed his time at UConn into becoming a first-round draft pick. (Stephen Slade/UConn)
Kay, 31, may have relatively little major league experience, but the road he has traveled has made him one of the veterans on a young, exuberant team. Many of his teammates, in fact, rib him about being drafted in 2016, when many of them were in middle school, or younger. In the next locker in New York was another baseball graybeard, lefty reliever Sean Newcomb, 33, a first-round draft pick in 2014 out of UHart, who had a 2.14 ERA going into the series..
“(Kay) has been throwing the ball real well,” Newcomb said. “He’s really found his fastball, how to use his fastball. It’s gained some velocity, and having the cutter off that, another hard offering, pitching in, all around the zone, just dominating with his fastball.”
Kay had to go to Japan to be allowed to do his thing, start and pitch without the threat of being demoted to the minors or released after any bad performance. It proved to be a valuable exile, and when he was ready to come back he chose a team which could also allow him to “do his thing.” The White Sox had little to lose, they appear to have acquired the tools it takes to win. And Anthony Kay is one of them.
“I knew the stuff was there, it was a matter of trusting it, being in the strike zone attacking,” Kay said. “… We saw the talent we had. Everyone knew we were talented, we just had to put it together on the field and come together as a team and do what we’ve been doing. To see the results that we’ve had so far, it’s been fun to be part of. “