For Davis Martin, the All-Star break was not a pause so much as a reset. The Chicago White Sox starter went back to Oklahoma, got in a 35-pitch bullpen at PitchingWRX in Oklahoma City and used the time to sort through the mechanical issues that had begun to show up in his delivery. That matters because the break was not just about rest after 100 1/3 first-half innings; it was about getting his body and his pitches back in sync.
Martin said fatigue from that workload had started to affect his delivery before the break, and the concern was never just surface-level results. His quibbles with performance centered on walks, missing horizontally and rotating side-to-side too much in his delivery. In other words, the problem was not simply whether he could get outs, but whether the underlying shape of his mechanics was staying stable enough to repeat his pitches. That is the kind of issue a pitcher can sometimes mask for a while, but it rarely disappears on its own.
After the break, Martin made three starts and posted a 4.68 ERA with a 14-4 K-BB ratio over 16 2/3 innings. The results were uneven, but the strike-throwing picture was not entirely discouraging, and Martin’s own view was that the breakdowns were concentrated in a small stretch rather than defining the whole run. As he put it, over the course of those innings, you can really look at just two innings where things went astray; the rest, in his words, were crisp, clean and built on getting ahead and staying ahead. That is a useful distinction for a pitcher whose issues are more about consistency than stuff.
What the break work was meant to fix
The clearest sign that Martin believed the break mattered was the way he described that bullpen session. He said it was different from the usual in-season work because it allowed him to hammer out the details without worrying about being two days from a start. That freedom matters for a pitcher trying to feel out a mechanical adjustment. By the end of the session, Alex Marney and Lane Ramsey had him try a different feel, and he said that was the moment everything clicked: he started executing pitches, feeling back in sync and not having to think about it as much.
Zach Bove framed the correction in more physical terms. He said Martin went home, threw a pen at his old facility and worked on a few things there, but the larger goal was to get some physical components of the delivery back in sync. Bove described the setup as a posture issue, with the emphasis on staying vertical and upright so the delivery could move more naturally in a north-south plane. That kind of adjustment may sound small, but for a starter with command questions it can be the difference between nibbling and attacking.
That also helps explain why Martin’s last start, when he gave up four runs in six innings against the Yankees, should be viewed with some nuance. On the surface, four runs is not an ideal line, but six innings still showed a pitcher capable of working deep enough to give his team a chance. For a player managing delivery questions while carrying a heavy first-half load, the bigger story is whether the post-break work holds up over time. If it does, the 3.61 ERA he carried into April and the sharper stretches after the break may end up looking more like the real version of Martin than the fatigue-fueled rough patches that interrupted it.
The White Sox do not need him to be perfect. They need him to keep the mechanics cleaner, the walks down and the delivery from drifting side to side. If the Oklahoma reset accomplished that, then the 35-pitch bullpen was not just a side note from the All-Star break. It was the start of Martin trying to turn a midseason adjustment into a better second half.
