It looks like Nathan Eovaldi made the right decision. So far this offseason, the pitching market has been much hotter than projected, and as the Winter Meetings kicked into high gear in Dallas on Tuesday, that trend continued. The 34-year-old right-hander will not regret for a moment declining his $20 million player option with the Rangers. After signing a two-year, $34 million contract (plus that option) before the 2023 season, Eovaldi will remain in Texas on a brand new three-year, $75 million deal. That $25 million average annual value far outstrips the projections of $16 million by Ben Clemens, $20 million from our readers, and $22 million from MLB Trade Rumors. As Nick Deeds noted for MLBTR, Eovaldi is only the third pitcher in the past 15 years to sign a deal for more than two years that starts in his age-35 season or later.
Speaking of pitchers who are old enough to remember the band the Wallflowers, the Texas rotation features an awful lot of them. Eovaldi rejoins Jon Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Cody Bradford, along with whatever presumably small, magnificent portion of a season Jacob deGrom can provide. If you’re keeping track at home, the average age of those pitchers is 32.28 years. Bradford is the baby, as he’ll be a tender 27 when the season starts. Dane Dunning, who took a step back last season (and turns 30 the week after next), will also be available. The rotation could also get an infusion of youth from Kumar Rocker, who absolutely annihilated the minors and pitched well in three big league starts during the 2024 season, and Jack Leiter, who struggled mightily in nine big league appearances.
That might just be enough starting pitching depth to make it through the season, but – with the exception of free agents Andrew Heaney and Max Scherzer – the Rangers are running back a rotation that finished the season ranked 22nd in WAR and 21st in ERA, FIP, and xFIP. Even in their championship 2023 season, the Rangers ranked just 18th in all four of those metrics. And it’s not as if they’re obviously due for a huge bounce-back year. If that group is going to meaningfully improve, it’ll mean deGrom staying healthy and either Rocker or Leiter making that last big jump, and neither of those propositions is what you’d consider a sure thing. Eovaldi is a proven big-game pitcher with a 3.05 career ERA and a 9-3 record in the postseason. (Of course, if the Rangers hope to avail themselves of that skill set, they’ll need to go out and find approximately one entire bullpen’s worth of relievers, but that’s a conversation for a different day).
Eovaldi’s bread and butter is a fantastic splitter, which he has been leaning on more and more each of the last four seasons. In 2024, the pitch was up to a 31% usage rate and it was as effective as ever. Over the past three seasons, Statcast has the pitch worth 16 runs, making it the 20th-most valuable offspeed pitch in baseball. Eovaldi also relies on a solid cutter and the occasional breaking pitch, and although the stuff models are unanimous in their disdain for his four-seamer, the pitch has performed well and its 95.4-mph average velocity is still above the league average. He gives up a lot more hard contact than any pitcher should be comfortable with, but he induces plenty of chases and groundouts, avoiding walks and striking out enough batters to get by. In 2024, his ERA ballooned from 2.97 in the first half to 4.81 in the second half, but the underlying numbers looked fairly similar.
Keeping Eovaldi around may not raise the rotation’s ceiling all that much, but it certainly reinforces the floor. In 2024, his 170.2 innings and 29 starts made him the only qualified Rangers pitcher, and his 3.80 ERA (which matched his 3.83 FIP nearly perfectly) ranked second among the team’s starters, behind Bradford. Over the two years of his previous deal, Eovaldi’s 5.1 WAR led the Rangers, with Gray and Heaney the only other pitchers above 2.0. Over the past five seasons, Eovaldi’s 12.7 WAR ranks 20th among all starters, and he’s also been a top-30 starter in terms of both innings pitched and games started. The last time Eovaldi ran an xFIP above 4.00 or a DRA- above 100 was 2019. All of this is to say that in terms of performance, Eovaldi is one of the most consistent pitchers around, and for a Rangers team that’s so dependent on the availability of deGrom and the emergence of Rocker and Leiter, consistency is a valuable commodity. If you set his age aside, there’s no reason to expect Eovaldi’s performance to suddenly deteriorate.
Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. The Rangers don’t have the luxury of setting Eovaldi’s age aside, and consistency isn’t just about performance. Eovaldi carries his own significant injury risk. He has already had two Tommy John surgeries, and in the past three seasons, he’s missed time due to both shoulder inflammation and a forearm strain, two body parts that set alarm bells ringing in the mind of any baseball fan. He’s surpassed 27 starts just three times in his 13-year career, and he’s now under contract through his age-37 season. Combine that injury history with the risk of simple age-based decline, and all of sudden, the chances that Eovaldi pitches three full, healthy seasons at his current performance level look pretty small.
The Rangers are certainly aware of those risks, but Eovaldi ranked 17th on our Top 50 Free Agents list for a reason, and besides, you try going out and finding a pitcher who carries no injury risk. Eovaldi is coming off two seasons in which he put up 2.4 and 2.7 WAR, and made his second All-Star game. He also went 5-0 with a 2.95 ERA during the Rangers’ 2023 championship run, clinching the World Series with six scoreless innings in Game 5. There’s a lot to like in the devil they know.
