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The Importance of Nathan Eovaldi’s Development

By Brendan Fitzgerald

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The Yankees acquired Nathan Eovaldi, Garrett Jones, and Domingo German for David Phelps and Martin Prado over the winter. Jones will be a nice bench player this season and German is a nice future asset, but the biggest target was Eovaldi. Eovaldi will be counted on a lot this year with the injury risks of CC Sabathia, Masahiro Tanaka, and Michael Pineda. He is also an arbitration eligible player through 2017.

Despite a average fastball velocity of 95.1 MPH in his career according to Pitch f/x, Eovaldi has a rather pedestrian strikeout rate of 16.2%. There is more to pitching than fastball velocity. Movement, location, pitch sequencing, secondary pitches, deception, etc. all play a role in striking hitters out. Larry Rothschild has a history of improving pitchers’ strikeout rates and the Yankees surely hope he can have success with Eovaldi over the next three years.

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Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com provides a further breakdown of Eovaldi. One of the most interesting parts of Sullivan’s article is the pitch comparisons. Eovaldi’s fastball compares most favorably with Gerrit Cole, Chris Archer, Wily Peralta, Carlos Carrasco, and Joe Kelly. Miles Mikolas, Dustin McGowan, Bud Norris, and Brandon Morrow have sliders most similar to Eovaldi.

Finally, Eovaldi’s curve ball is most like those of Phil Hughes, Jason Hammel, and Odrisamer Despaigne. These are just interesting tidbits and the real takeaway from Sullivan is that the fastball velocity alone won’t get hitters out, the sliders isn’t very effective against lefites, and the curveball is used infrequently as a put-away pitch. Improvement on one of these three pitches or utilization of a fourth pitch could take Eovaldi’s game to the next level.

Attempts to implement a quality change-up were not very successful, so Eovaldi plans to try a splitter. This will help in getting lefties out and provide him with another offering to keep hitters off-balance. Another 3 WAR season from Eovaldi would be huge for the Yankees this coming season.

However, the Yankees assuredly believe there is more potential in Eovaldi, perhaps enough to elevate him to a legit number 2 in a rotation with injury risk this coming season. The splitter could be the key to this improvement.

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