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With the 2025 Texas Rangers season having come to an end, we shall be, over the course of the offseason, taking a look at every player who appeared in a major league game for the Texas Rangers in 2025.
Today we are looking at starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi.
Nathan Eovaldi makes me happy.
I bet you feel the same way.
Just look at the photo that goes with this post.
(Yes, I know, there’s a video playing at the top of the post, but you know what I mean. Go back to the main page if you need to remind yourself of the photo that goes with this post.)
He is a good pitcher. He is, by all accounts, a great person and a great teammate, someone who makes a point of connecting with the other pitchers on the staff, mentoring and supporting and generally being a great hang.
He throws strikes, he doesn’t walk guys, he keeps runs off the board.
Nathan Eovaldi had arguably his best season in 2025, at the ripe young age of 35.
I kind of want to take “arguably” out of that sentence. Not kind of, in fact. I do want to take it out.
But while he’s never had a bWAR better than the 4.3 he put up in 2025, he did match that number in 2021. And his 2021 fWAR of 5.7 is much better than his 3.7 fWAR in 2025, the second-highest mark of his career.
So I’m resisting. I’m resisting the urge. As much as my right hand wants to move away from the keyboard and take the mouse and move up three paragraphs and do a big ol’ DELETE, I’m not going to do it.
Bad hand.
Nathan Eovaldi put up a 1.73 ERA in 2025. It looked like he was going to be vying for the ERA title until a rotator cuff strain in late August ended his season.
It was going to be a close call anyway as to whether he’d get to the 162 innings necessary to qualify, since he missed a month earlier in the season, but it seemed likely he’d have cracked that threshold if he had stayed healthy the rest of the season. Instead, he ended the year with 130 innings over 22 starts.
And, look, we know this about Nathan Eovaldi. He has always struggled to stay on the mound. He made his major league debut all the way back in 2011 — with the Los Angeles Dodgers! — and has qualified for the ERA title just three times. We know Eovaldi is going to have injury issues, is going to have an i.l. stint or two in any given season, and we accept that.
But when Eovaldi took the mound, you could count on him. Only three times did he not go at least five innings. Once was in late May, when he left after two innings and ended up on the injured list. Once was in late June, his first game back from the injured list, when he was on a pitch count. And once was his second start of the year, when he was pulled with two outs in the fifth. He went at least 6 innings in 14 of his 22 starts.
Eovaldi allowed more than three runs in a game just once in 2025, that one being an August start against Arizona where he gave up five runs on three homers. He allowed two earned runs or fewer in 19 of his 22 outings. He walked more than two hitters in a game just twice. He issued zero or one unintentional walks in 18 starts.
He was even the rare 2025 Ranger pitcher who was better on the road than at home in 2025, with a 1.39 ERA away from The Shed and a 2.15 ERA at home.
He has a fun mix of pitches, throwing his splitter, fastball, cutter and curve all at least 20% of the time, and all of them are pitches that he gets good results with. His occasional sinker is a good pitch. The slider he throws very rarely isn’t all that, but that’s okay, because he hardly ever throws it.
I was unenthused about the Rangers signing Eovaldi in the 2022-23 offseason. I now want him to retire a Texas Ranger.
Previously: