Rangers starter Nathan Eovaldi is having his best season at age 35. Here's why

New York Times

5 hours ago

He's thrown 111 innings. His ERA starts with a 1. Only two pitchers in baseball can make that claim. One is Paul Skenes. The other is Texas Rangers right-hander Nathan Eovaldi. It's been a white-hot season for the veteran righty so far.
What's weird about Eovaldi's success thus far this season is that from all that we know about what makes pitches better, most of his pitches are the same as ever — or worse. That's about what you'd expect from a 35-year-old starting pitcher. The fastball is slower than ever. So's the curve, the split and the cutter, and he's lost some bite on those pitches.
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What's been the magic sauce this year for the Rangers' starter? Three things stand out when you look under the hood.
For one, his curveball, which he's throwing more than ever, looks different this year. He's never had this combination of horizontal and vertical movement on the pitch before. Most years, it has more horizontal movement than it does now — he had up to six inches more horizontal movement on the curveball with the Yankees in 2016. In the years it's been more of a 12-to-6, like this year, it's had more drop.
It's gone from this, where it swept right into Jarren Duran's barrel last year…
…. to this, where it stopped short of landing on the barrel swung by Jasson Domínguez.
In any case, it's more of a vertical pitch even if it does move side-to-side, and that's made it a better weapon this year against lefties, who are hitting .068 (and slugging .068) against the pitch after slugging .410 off of it last year. It's gone from his fourth-most used pitch against lefties to his second-most. Going to more of a vertical movement pattern — he dropped his arm angle slightly — has made the pitch more deceptive.
'I had really good results on my curveball today. Probably should have used a little more,' Eovaldi said after a spring training start this year, before he started throwing the curveball more than he had in years. Since then, he's leaned into the pitch even more.
Next, he may be hiding a new pitch. Could he be throwing a sinker?
Sinkers, as opposed to four-seam fastballs, always have more arm-side movement even if they don't have a ton of drop. Look at the percentage of Eovaldi's fastballs that have had more than 16 inches of arm-side run, by season.
In 2022, Eovaldi threw 664 fastballs, and only eight of them had more than 16 inches of run. This year, he's thrown 449 fastballs, and 108 of them have moved similarly.
Here's what it looks like in practice. In 2023, he threw a four-seamer with 10 inches of run to Brandon Drury, who flew out.
This year, Eovaldi threw one in a similar location to Mike Trout with seven more inches of run.
These are subtle changes to our eyes, but not to the computer's, or — as the results seem to suggest — to the hitter's.
And it's totally plausible that he's throwing a sinker. He used to. And this spring training, he told us he might.
'It just comes down to trusting and executing it,' he said about his sinker in February. 'I think once I'm able to slow it down and start executing it better, it'll be a good weapon for me to use up and in to the righties and have another weapon inside and to help the splitter out and all the other offspeed stuff.'
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Looks like the sinker might be back, flying under the radar.
There's one more shift in the righty's game that's pretty obvious when you look at one simple chart. His pitch usage.
In 2015, Eovaldi adjusted his splitter and started ramping up its usage, maybe because he'd discovered that even though he had gas, no fastball was too big to hide. Now he's taken that trend that he started 10 years ago to its most extreme destination, and is finally throwing the splitter more often than his fastball (fastballs?) this year for the first time. This last chart may be the most important change to note, because it shows that he's now just as likely to throw any pitch at any point, which takes the load off of any one pitch to be great by itself.
It's been quite the evolution for the Rangers' starter, who used to have great gas and touch 100+ mph in games while also giving up homers and hard contact. Then he discovered the splitter, went to work on it to the point that it's his primary pitch now. The cutter and curve, while slower than they've ever been, have more intriguing shapes, and fit into a much wider pitch-mix. The fastball even has a couple wrinkles now.
'He's just an artist out there,' his manager Bruce Bochy said after a recent start. 'His pitchability, his command, his focus, the way he reads swings, he can adjust on the fly, all those things. You've got four pitches with command of all of them that he can throw anytime. That's why he's having so much success.'
If there ever was a thrower that became a pitcher over time, it's Nathan Eovaldi.
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