Michael Kopech won a Pitching Ninja award for 2021

Rob Friedman, also known as the Pitching Ninja, is one of the most entertaining and knowledgeable baseball people on the internet. If you haven’t checked out his work, he is brilliant. He loves his pitching and does a great job breaking it down for everyone to learn a thing or two. It is extra fun when he features Chicago White Sox players on his Youtube channel and Twitter account.

On Wednesday, he featured a White Sox pitcher in such an honorable way. Michael Kopech is responsible for the Pitching Ninja “most unfair at-bat of the year“. We all know that Kopech has the ability to make hitters look silly but he was extra lethal in this particular sequence.

The at-bat came in the Field of Dreams Game that the White Sox played against the New York Yankees in Iowa. It was one of the most spectacular games in the history of Major League Baseball for a lot of reasons and Kopech was a big part of it.

He was facing Roughned Odor of the Yankees in this award-winning at-bat. He struck him out using incredibly awesome sliders and a 100 miles per hour fastball. When Kopech has that mix going at its best, he is borderline impossible to hit.

Michael Kopech was brilliant for the Chicago White Sox during the 2021 season.

It made it even better that Kopech performed this way while wearing that amazing throwback uniform that the White Sox put together for the Field of Dreams. They match the ones that Shoeless Joe Jackson wore in the movie. Kopech went out there looking good and dominated his way through his part of the game.

Seeing Kopech get attention like this is very rewarding. He has had some major hurdles to jump in order to reach this point of his MLB career. Between the Tommy John surgery and opting out of the COVID-19 2020 season, Kopech really had to be tough to get back to this level.

Now we look ahead. Pitching Ninja’s most unfair at-bat of the season isn’t the only award on Kopech’s mind. He is talented enough to win a Cy Young and help lead the White Sox to a World Series. It is up to him to go out there and do it.

As mentioned before, he can do amazing things when he is making his pitches to the best of his ability. He dealt with some tipping issues not long after the Field of Dreams game but he certainly corrected it. Be ready for a big 2022 season from Kopech as he transfers back to being a starter.