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Velocity gave Nathan Eovaldi a ticket to the big leagues as a 21-year-old. Yet the same trait created one of the great unsolved riddles in baseball.
How was it that a starting pitcher with one of the most electric arms in the game struggled so much to strike out hitters?
“It’s a strange dynamic, really, when you see guys like that, with that kind of velocity, not get swings and misses,” recounted Yankees pitching coach Larry Rothschild, who worked with Eovaldi in 2015-16. “I would pose the question, ‘How could this be?’ Nobody could really answer it. It was kind of a mystery.”
Ironically, reliance on the thing that got Eovaldi to the big leagues on a fast track — a high-octane fastball that could crack triple digits — was the same thing that limited his impact for several years.
Eovaldi threw hard, but he did so predictably.
Roughly two of every three pitches he threw from the time he made his big league debut in 2011 through the end of the 2014 season were heaters. That was partly a reflection of the allure of one of the hardest fastballs in the game, partly out of the need for the young righthander to develop his command of the pitch, and partly because he didn’t have a reliable pitch to use with it.
“Obviously the velocity was there, but the command of the off-speed pitches was something that just takes time,” said Dodgers pitching coach Rick Honeycutt. “He didn’t have consistent off-speed pitches to get [hitters] off of [the fastball], so a lot of deep counts, a lot of foul balls.”
With the Dodgers, Eovaldi was fastball-dominant, with a slider he struggled to keep in the zone as his primary secondary option. He also threw a curveball and changeup, but eventually, with him struggling in 2012, Honeycutt suggested that Eovaldi try to throw a cutter — a pitch similar enough to his fastball that it might prove an easier one to master.
Yet just as that experiment was showing some initial promise, the Dodgers dealt him to the Marlins as part of a two-player package that landed Hanley Ramirez.
“When [Marlins GM] Mike Hill said it’s going to take Nathan Eovaldi, I said, ‘Oh, geez. Can you pick another name?’ ” said former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti. “I knew the potential for this young player at that point in time was really the upper end of the scale.
“It was a matter of him adjusting, a matter of him continuing to refine the skill set he had, and staying healthy.”
The Marlins wanted Eovaldi to develop his curveball, slider, and changeup, and never asked him to throw the cutter. Though he did learn to work in the strike zone in Miami, he rarely missed bats while doing so. In parts of three seasons for the Marlins, Eovaldi went 13-27 with a 4.10 ERA and just 6.6 strikeouts per nine innings.
Yet near the end of his time in Miami, pitching coach Chuck Hernandez introduced Eovaldi to a splitter that became a weapon in 2015 with the Yankees. Rothschild and the Yankees encouraged Eovaldi to increase his usage of secondary pitches, and he showed promise in his first season of throwing his fastball less than 50 percent of the time, going 14-3 with a 4.20 ERA while bumping up his strikeout rate to 7.1 per nine innings in 2015.
The gains didn’t hold. Eovaldi had a dreadful first half in 2016, giving up homers at such an alarming rate that he was moved to the bullpen. Rather than sulking, Eovaldi spitballed potential solutions.
“I liked giving Larry a hard time, telling him I had other pitches I could work with,” recalled Eovaldi. “I told him I had a cutter. He said, ‘All right, let’s see it.’ ”
Rothschild saw a pitch that could make it harder for hitters to sit on the fastball. Whereas his splitter kept tumbling out of the zone, hitters couldn’t take a cutter that Eovaldi threw for strikes. He used it in his final five outings of 2016, but a promising stretch (a 3.46 ERA in 26 innings back in the rotation) came to a screeching halt with news that Eovaldi would require a second Tommy John surgery late in 2016.
While that procedure meant that he’d have to sit out for more than a year, it also gave Eovaldi a chance to step back and recognize what he could become. He’d been a different pitcher with the cutter.
“I had a lot of time to think about [mixing pitches],” he said. “I had a lot of time to work on things.
“It’s kind of one of the nice things about going through the Tommy John process. You go six months without throwing. It’s like you had the knowledge of how to do things, but you can break your bad habits, start fresh, and go from there.”
While Eovaldi focused in 2017 on rehabbing in the first season of a two-year deal with the Rays, this spring, he and pitching coach Kyle Snyder explored how he might employ the cutter to better effect. Snyder suggested a slight change to the grip, and results came almost immediately.
The pitch transformed everything else that Eovaldi threw, helping to explain why the righthander has thrown it 32 percent of the time this year — the fourth-highest usage rate among big league starters. He throws it as hard as many pitchers deliver their fastballs, with an average velocity of 92.7 – easily the hardest-thrown cutter by a starter.
The velocity of the pitch roughly splits the difference between his fastball (97.0, the third-hardest by a starter in the big leagues) and his slider (86.9), yet the three pitches move in completely different ways.
The fastball has some arm-side run toward righties, the cutter has late bite on a flat plane toward lefties, while the slider dives down while sweeping across to Eovaldi’s glove side.
The similarity out of the hand of the cutter to both the slider and fastball has given Eovaldi the trait that was missing during his early career: deception.
Hitters no longer see the fastball almost as soon as it’s released, thus helping him to a career-high swing-and-miss rate of 12 percent on fastballs. The difficulty in distinguishing the slider from the cutter likewise has yielded a career-high swing-and-miss rate (18 percent) on his breaking ball.
As the season has progressed, Eovaldi has thrown a steadily increasing number of cutters and a decreasing number of fastballs, to the point where he’s thrown more cutters than fastballs in each of his three outings with the Red Sox.
“He was open-minded to pitch distribution, how to best get his stuff to work,” said Snyder, who worked chiefly with Eovaldi this year. “How a lot of that stuff came together was probably just a product of his curiosity.”
The cutter allowed Eovaldi to feature a drastically different mix from his early career, and helps explain why his former pitching coaches see a pitcher who, at 28, seems capable of taking his career to a different level.
While there are no guarantees that he will do so — as impressive as he was during his two-start, 15-inning shutout streak to start his Sox career, his eight-run yield over 2⅔ innings against the Orioles was nearly as dreadful — he now has the tools that give him a chance to solve his early-career riddles.
“If you finally get that feel, that grip on a pitch, that’s what can make you elite when you still have that ability to throw 97, 98 with ease,” said Honeycutt. “It makes a different light go on.
“I’m extremely happy for him, for his success, and getting to a great team like Boston with the record they have, they really did their homework and picked up a major piece.”
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on twitter at @alexspeier.