We like to say that looks can be deceiving, but sometimes they offer a pretty clear picture. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. … you may as well trust your eyes on that one. The Blue Jays slugger has a Hall of Fame name and the presence to match. He’s also the size of a cruise ship. Vladito is exactly what your eyes tell you.

On April 13, after recording 0-fers in his first two games against the Yankees this year, Guerrero Jr. cracked three homers and added a double in the Blue Jays’ 6-4 win at Yankee Stadium. The first two dingers came off ace Gerrit Cole, the last against stud reliever Jonathan Loáisiga.

The next night, the Yankees took a 3-0 lead into the top of the ninth. Guerrero Jr., who struck out to lead off the eighth inning, stood firmly on the action’s periphery, a deceptively dangerous position. As Yanks manager Aaron Boone watched closer Aroldis Chapman get warm, there was the precarious imbalance of a titanic game-changer lying in wait. Guerrero Jr., the sixth man due up, probably wouldn’t get a chance to hit; if he did, it would be with everything on the line.

Boone’s anxiety level no doubt rose as Cavan Biggio led off with a walk. Things got hairier when Chapman offered another free pass to the next batter, Santiago Espinal. Then Matt Chapman walked on four pitches, and Boone had to make a change. He summoned the swingman Michael King and probably said a prayer or two. With apologies to Jimmy Dugan, this was the rare moment for crying in baseball. Bases loaded, none out, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. two batters away.

King went to work, attacking Toronto’s All-Star leadoff man George Springer. A swinging strike, a foul and a called Strike 3 finally put a tally in the out column, as another baseball legacy, Bo Bichette, stepped in, replaced in the on-deck circle by Vladito.

Bichette looked at a two-seamer down and in, frustrated by a generous strike call. Then he offered at a four-seamer down and away, hitting a soft bloop that DJ LeMahieu was able to reel in while moving back and to his left. The second baseman fired to first to double off the runner, and the collective exhale from Yankee Stadium could have disrupted marine traffic across Long Island Sound.

The turnaround took all of five pitches.

Later, Boone offered a note of assuredness regarding his young pitcher, who has opened 2022 by embracing a role that isn’t really a role while becoming one of the dominant pitchers in the game. “We have a ton of confidence in Kinger there,” the skipper said, “and know he wasn’t going to be afraid of the situation.”

King, meanwhile, enjoyed his first big league save, at once a statistical feat and a dramatic understatement. Even as the pitcher managed to complete his job while avoiding a showdown with the Blue Jays’ most fearsome slugger, the grim possibility hovered over the entire outing. King -- who turned 27 on May 25 -- is the anti-Vladito. He is the one who fools our eyes and our brains. Nothing about him makes sense in the way that the son of a Hall of Fame slugger being a dominant power bat so obviously does.

King is skilled, with an outstanding arsenal and a deep understanding of the numbers that matter in 21st century baseball. But he’s also a guy who leans into his on-field fearlessness, a trait defined by so many different words that we’re not allowed to print. Every pitcher, he says, needs an attitude like that. King, though, seems to hold a doctorate in competitive arrogance. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.? The All-Star? The MVP runner-up? The guy who hit three homers 24 hours earlier?

Whatever.

“It’s nice not to face him,” King said after the Houdini escape. “But I have all the confidence in the world if I had to.”

***

Cockiness isn’t listed as one of a baseball player’s five tools, but if it were, King’s would be an 80 grade. “He’s a very confident human being,” says reliever Lucas Luetge, sounding his subdued part in a chorus of Yankees amused by King’s demeanor. “I mean,” says Boone, “he does not lack for confidence.”

It’s here that we should point something out, because there’s really no more effective way to say this: King looks like the type of guy that hitters really want to beat. He’s listed at 6-foot-3, and yet it’s shocking to stand beside him in person and realize that the measurement is actually accurate; somehow, watching him pitch, King just seems smaller, less substantial. It’s part of what makes his output so extraordinary. It’s also, you imagine, something that really gets under the skin of the batters he dispatches.

There’s a casual ease to King’s bearing off the mound, the laugh of a guy aware of his own surprising brashness. Indeed, over the course of a 20-minute conversation, he stops himself three separate times to acknowledge that he knows how cocky what he’s about to say will seem. It’s not so much that he cares about the perception, just that he’s aware of it.

“This will be a little inappropriate, but I’ve always been told to be a [jerk] on the mound -- once you get between the lines, be a [jerk],” King says, and you can probably guess what was in the brackets. “I’m not that way off the field; I’m very smiley and happy and whatever. It’s definitely kind of a lock-in mentality. My name is called, and I immediately flip the switch like a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing.”

It would be wrong to call it an act, but there is a performance quality to it. Whether he’s strutting around the mound after another strikeout, staring stone-faced at the catcher or suggesting after a miraculous escape that he would have had no concerns about doubling down the intensity by facing a mammoth slugger with the game on the line, King is clearly in control of the image he projects. “It’s another tactic to use against hitters,” he says. “If a hitter is up there and he sees that I have a ton of confidence and I’m rolling, I think it’s a lot scarier than if I’m timid up there, and you can tell that I feel like I don’t belong. But if I feel like I belong there, and it’s like, This is my mound, and this is my game, and it’s going to be a fight, me against you, I think that gives me at least a mental edge, on top of attacking him with whatever stuff I have working that day.”

The flip side to that, as Lindsey Adler wrote earlier this year in The Athletic, came in June 2021, when he faced eventual AL MVP Shohei Ohtani for the first time. King tried to sneak his fourth-best pitch past the Japanese slugger, briefly battling nerves about attacking with something that Ohtani might have seen on tape. The ball ended up in the right-field bleachers, and the pitcher learned a loud lesson about trust issues on the mound.

That homer came in a start for King, during a season in which he thrived in a number of different roles. Boone called King’s name 22 times in 2021, 16 of them in relief. The pitcher was reliable and useful, but his success often worked against him; stretched out and able to offer spot starts or long relief, King regularly found himself in a car to Triple-A after another excellent outing. He had a Minor League option, and he didn’t serve much purpose on the roster in the days that he needed to rest after throwing multiple innings. The coaching staff, though -- pitching coach Matt Blake and bullpen coach Mike Harkey, in particular -- were clear about how they viewed the output they were seeing from King.

“You can be forthright with these guys and honest,” Blake says, “and keep it centered on, ‘These are the things that we value. We’ll continue to value these because we think these make winning pitchers, and that’s what we’re trying to do here.’” The clear and candid feedback allowed King to dial down the temperature on every batter, freed of the mentality common to Major League tweeners that any bad pitch could be your last in The Show.

King says that he is happy with his current role, but he notes, characteristically, “I guess this is cockiness coming out, but I feel like I have a starter’s arsenal because I have those four pitches and can throw multiple pitches to different batters.”

What has helped has been an evolution not just in how he views the job, but in his sense of what the job can be. The ability to start, or to close, or to work the fifth, sixth and seventh innings can totally change how Boone manages the bullpen for a week at a time. “To have that kind of Swiss Army knife that he is down there is really valuable,” the manager says.

For King, there’s some humility in the role, but also reality. He can’t control the Yankees’ roster, but he can enjoy the ride. “This starting five is lights out right now,” he says. “And so, I’d much rather be in my role in the big leagues than starting in the Minor Leagues. But if Boonie ever needs a spot start, or goes to a six-man, or if somebody goes down, I would love to jump into that position.”

***

In the meantime, King works with what’s in front of him, and he does so immaculately (indeed, the right-hander twirled a nine-pitch, three-strikeout frame against Boston last June, the first known occurrence in the history of the rivalry). During a bullpen session just a few weeks before that feat, Gerrit Cole and then-teammate Corey Kluber watched King work, and Kluber -- who would throw a no-hitter the next night -- noted how similar he thought King’s style was to his own.

Kluber throws a notoriously unclassifiable breaking pitch; it’s not a slider or a curveball, but is known colloquially as a “Kluberball,” with less lateral break than a slider and less vertical action than a curveball. Watching King, he saw a guy who could benefit from both the pitch and the approach. “Kluber kind of took over the conversation and talked about his breaking ball a ton, and different cues that he thinks of when it’s not going well,” King says. “Studying him and knowing when he throws it, when he likes to throw it, different sequences that he’d use, different hitters that he looks for that he can really expose, those were big for me.”

The pitch contributed to that starter’s arsenal King mentions. He attacks righties with a nasty sinker and the Kluberball, and he baffles lefties with a changeup and a four-seamer that has become a bigger part of his repertoire this year. The pitches all play off one another, in ways that are uncommon to pitchers emerging from the bullpen in the late innings. The two-seamer, in particular, looks unfair, seeming to dart backward on right-handers. “He can tunnel it with different pitches,” catcher Jose Trevino says. “He can tunnel it with the four-seam. He can tunnel it with a changeup. He can tunnel it with the slider. I think that’s what makes it really good is that everything’s coming out of the same slot. As a hitter, you’re going to have to make a decision.”

Trevino knows well how different the approach can be for starters as opposed to relievers. A starting pitcher is often thinking two or three at-bats ahead, concerned with both winning the matchup at hand while also, perhaps, setting something up for the next time through the order. That’s not a concern for most relief pitchers. But with King able to pitch multiple frames in relief, he can do both: attack hitters with everything he has, while also keeping the mental game going in case he turns the lineup over.

King understands the science of pitching as well as almost any pitcher on the roster, save perhaps Clay Holmes. He was a student of baseball wizard Adam Ottavino when the 6-foot-5 right-hander pitched in the Bronx, and King enjoys working with the Yankees’ analytics-forward coaches on pitch design and game planning. But his success is also about leaning into his unique role and celebrating what makes it different. Indeed, the mysterious Kluberball is a perfect metaphor for all that King does on the mound, as the pitcher tries, borrowing a slogan from Apple, to “Think Different.”

“You definitely want to be off the charts as much as possible in terms of that movement, and make sure it’s different for every hitter, because you don’t want them to come in and be comfortable in that event,” King says. “Everybody got to the big leagues because of something that is an outlier, and that allows them to get outs at any level. And so, knowing your identity is a huge thing for everybody in the big leagues.

“I think that my sinker was one that helped me get through the Minor Leagues. I felt like it was more of an outlier pitch. And getting to the big leagues, unless you’re Mariano Rivera, you need to have two pitches that are outliers, that can get outs. So, once I got here, a big part for me was to really focus on that slider movement, breaking ball movement, Kluberball movement, to make sure that it was a different pitch.”

The results are self-evident. Through May 20, King’s 25 2⁄3 innings had played out to the tune of a 1.40 ERA. He had struck out 39.4% of hitters, and when they made contact, they barreled him up just 5.7% of the time (the league average, for comparison, was 6.7%). More than that, he was getting batters to swing at stuff out of the zone, drawing chase swings 36.3% of the time, and increasing his whiff percentage all the way to 41.2% (his previous best was 24.9%).

“He just continues to improve in the strike-throwing department, and that’s probably just a result of experience and being more and more sound and comfortable in his delivery,” Boone says. “With our situation right now, he’s filling a pretty valuable role.”

***

The entire package of 2022 Michael King was perfectly on display this past April 22, when he relieved Jameson Taillon to start the sixth inning and proceeded to strike out eight Cleveland hitters over his three innings. Why eight and not nine? “I guess I didn’t have it,” King jokes.

The first batter King faced was Franmil Reyes, and quickly the count was 3-0. But King turned the at-bat around and caught Reyes looking at a sinker. After a groundout and a single, King K’d the next seven hitters, all swinging. He threw 42 pitches, 31 strikes, and served as a one-man bridge from Taillon to the closer Chapman as Boone navigated a tight, early-season win with just three pitchers.

Between that outing -- with what he called a “literally terrible” warm-up in the bullpen and the immediate 3-0 hole -- and his next appearance, when he noticed that his velocity was down and still fought through 21⁄3 innings with what he felt was less than his best stuff, there’s a bit of a game to how King approaches his results. He doesn’t watch video of bad outings (not that there would be much to watch this year), preferring to forget about the bad nights and instead focus on what he knows he does well whenever trouble hits. And he enjoys using that mentality to battle through adversity.

“I always prided myself on figuring it out and still putting up zeros when I only had one or even zero pitches,” he says. “The outings that I would be more proud of are the ones where, after the game, you look and you see that I had no command of all four of my pitches.

“When I have all four pitches, I should be able to get outs. So not having the velo early and then figuring it out late and still getting outs is nice.”

Luetge says that the entire bullpen watched the eight-strikeout outing in awe. “We were even joking about it,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You got your strikeouts for the month out of the way.’” Chad Green told King that people were going to expect eight K’s every time out, that anything less would be a disappointment. And if you spend any time with King, what’s clear is that he enjoys the challenge.

Maybe it changes someday, but at the moment, it’s impossible to imagine King ever being larger than life. You just can’t see him being overtaken by cameras and autograph hounds on the streets of New York in the same way that you know Cole and Aaron Judge must. King just looks too ordinary, until he records his seventh straight swinging strikeout. And while most opponents aren’t going to admit it, you have to think that the deceptive appearance -- the cocky outlier pitching like a modern-day Whitey Ford -- adds to the irritation. “I think a lot of pitchers do try to bring that arrogance, or being a [jerk] on the mound,” says Joey Gallo. “I think it’s a competitive nature. So when the guy has really good stuff like King does, and he knows that, and he’s a [jerk] about it? Yeah, it’s frustrating.”

King laughs at every question regarding his mound persona, and smiles at his own demeanor so much that you can understand why he has to be Mr. Hyde in combat. More than that, it doesn’t even seem like a dig to call someone cocky when he seems to want to make it his defining characteristic.

“Cocky can have a negative connotation,” Boone says. “A lot of times when the guy’s a good guy, and he surprises you with his strut or his demeanor between the lines or when he’s competing, it can be a little bit endearing. I like to think that’s the case with Michael.”

Or, as Luetge says, “We wouldn’t mess with him if we didn’t like him.”