Eovaldi picked right time to be ‘Nasty’
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Bruce Bochy lumbered away from the press room podium inside Tropicana Field with his burgeoning star third baseman alongside him and his seasoned ace ahead of him.
“Hey, closer,” the Texas Rangers’ manager said to a champagne-andbeer-soaked Nathan Eovaldi, who dipped away from Texas’ celebration to endure a postgame press conference. “Go get ‘em.”
One last task for the man who — to borrow a classic Bochy-ism — had already done enough.
He’d already delivered on everything else.
The 34-year-old pitched 6 2/3 innings of one-run baseball in Texas’ 7-1, AL wild-card series-clinching win against the Tampa Bay Rays on Wednesday. He made quite good on the Nasty Nate moniker. Whatever recent injury-induced performance concerns were throttled by the AllStar’s innate ability to shove in big games. His crispest start in months — accompanied by a rookie-driven Texas offense — guided the Rangers into a five-game division series against the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, which starts Saturday.
“I’ll say this,” Bochy said. “We had the right guy out there.”
The right version of the right guy, too.
Eovaldi’s first inning lasted eight pitches. AL batting champion Yandy Diaz reached on a leadoff single, then Eovaldi fanned postseason superhero Randy Arozarena with a low splitter and induced a frame-ending Harold Ramirez double play. He struck out two batters in the second, third and fourth innings, then faced the minimum in both the fifth (courtesy of a Curtis Mead double play) and the sixth.
Tampa Bay, shut out by Jordan Montgomery in Tuesday’s series opener, finally chipped away at Eovaldi in the seventh. Three singles in a span of four at bats — from Josh Lowe, Isaac Paredes and Mead — scored the Rays’ first run of the series to make it 7-1 and ended Eovaldi’s day. Bochy called on Josh Sborz out of the bullpen for the inning’s final out and Eovaldi, after a hard-earned pat on the back from his manager, walked back toward a Rangers dugout that had broken into applause.
“I had a lot of confidence coming into today,” said Eovaldi, who spent a month on the injured list due to a right forearm strain in August. “and I think that’s one of the big things is, you’ve got to be able to turn the page from what happened yesterday to today.”
Yeah, about yesterday (or, rather, the last month of yesterday’s): the right-hander yielded a 9.60 ERA in his first six starts off of the injured list in September. His walk rate spiked. His pitches flattened. The velocity, at times, cratered. The proposition of facing a lineup for a second (where he had a 12.86 ERA) or third time through (where he had a 20.25 ERA) seemed altogether treacherous.
Eovaldi elicited 16 swings-and-misses against Tampa Bay, his most since a June 15 start vs. the Los Angeles Angels. Same goes for his eight strikeouts, three of which came on his fastball, three on his splitter and two on his curveball. He hadn’t gone longer than six innings since a pivotal July 1 start vs. the Houston Astros. His average fastball velocity on Wednesday (94.9 miles per hour) had a touch more life than the 94.1-mph average he’d chucked in September. Talk about timing.
See, when the Rangers signed the Alvin native to a two-year, $34 million deal in December, the club landed a veteran All-Star to accompany the newly-inked Jacob deGrom in a revamped Texas rotation. They’d also acquired a necessary piece that any team with hopes of a playoff run needs: someone who can perform on the biggest stage.
Eovaldi, a World Series champion in 2018 with the Boston Red Sox, now has a 2.90 ERA in seven postseason starts. He could next pitch the third game of the ALDS vs. Baltimore in Arlington on five days of rest.
“I understand what’s on the line,” Eovaldi said of postseason starts. “It makes it easier to go out there after Monty’s performance last night.”
Eovaldi spent the month of August on the injured list. Scherzer landed on it with a teres major strain in September. Jon Gray, by way of a forearm strain, found his way onto it, too, by the end of the regular season. The Rangers were so strapped for starters by the time they wrapped up the first 162 in Seattle that reliever-turned-starter Dane Dunning pitched on three days rest and Heaney was called upon for his first start in over a month.
Texas spent much of the season’s final month-plus bent over backwards, creatively tweaking their rotation to survive a playoff push.
It all looked so easy against Tampa Bay.
“We came into the season with what, eight starters? I think it ran down to five,” Eovaldi said. “And, again, each guy is going to have that opportunity to take the ball, and they’ve got to be ready for it.”
Nasty Nate, something of a resident big-game hunter, was Wednesday.