Nathan Eovaldi's Superhuman Postseason Is Springboard to MLB Free-Agency Jackpot

To a certain extent in the regular season and to a far greater extent in the postseason, Nathan Eovaldi has finally become a pitcher worthy of his extraordinary right arm.

It will soon be time for him to be paid accordingly.

For now, it's no exaggeration to say that the Boston Red Sox would not have won their fourth World Series championship since 2004 without Eovaldi. He helped get them to October with 54 solid innings after coming over from the Tampa Bay Rays in a July 25 trade. Once there, the hard-throwing righty became their best and most valuable pitcher.

Eovaldi put up a 1.61 ERA over 22.1 playoff innings, spread out over two starts and four relief appearances. This was all against the second, fifth and sixth highest-scoring offenses in Major League Baseball to boot.

The one tragedy, as it were, is the lone earned run that Eovaldi, 28, gave up in relief: Max Muncy's walk-off home run at Dodger Stadium in Game 3 of the World Series on Friday.

But since that came on his 97th pitch—the most-ever recorded by a reliever in a World Series game—in the longest Fall Classic game ever, Eovaldi earned a hero's reception from his teammates anyway.

"That was the most incredible pitching performance I've ever seen," Rick Porcello, who started Game 3 for Boston, told reporters. "Actually after the game was over, I started crying because that was—I mean, he's grinding. Every pitch. He literally gave everything he had on every single pitch, and it was special. It was a lot of fun to watch. That's the epitome of reaching down deep. I'm really proud of him."

All's well that ends well. Rather than compound the disappointment of Game 3, the Red Sox fought back to win Games 4 and 5 to dispatch the Los Angeles Dodgers in five. Eovaldi and everyone else will be wearing rings come next spring.

Between now and then, Eovaldi has some money to make on the winter free-agent market.

Frank Franklin II/Associated Press

Eovaldi has had Tommy John surgery twice, first as a high schooler and again as a professional in 2016. By the time he went in for the latter, he was sitting on a pedestrian 4.21 ERA over 739 career innings for the Dodgers, Miami Marlins and New York Yankees.

So when he took the mound for his Rays debut back on May 30, it was the proper start of a true reclamation project. What followed was a 3.45 ERA over 133.1 total innings, and it was all possible thanks to his evolution Eovolution.

As evidenced by his four-seam fastball's 97.4 mph average and 101.6 mph maximum, Eovaldi's superb arm strength wasn't lessened by his second Tommy John operation. He did, however, take to throwing his fastball higher on average—a standard adjustment to the launch-angle revolution, to be sure, but it worked nonetheless.

The slugging percentage against Eovaldi's heater dropped from .446 in 2016 all the way to .309.

It also helped that Eovaldi made it more difficult for hitters to sit on his fastball. He threw it a career-low 39.9 percent of the time. The other 60.1 percent of his pitches were made up of cutters, splitters, sliders and curveballs.

Eovaldi's cutter was the biggest beneficiary (31.9 percent) of that shift, and why not? It was a standout pitch in terms of both its velocity and its spin rate:

Data courtesy of BaseballSavant.MLB.com

All told, what Eovaldi achieved in 2018 is perhaps the most GIF-able arsenal of pitches in MLB.

To wit, here's a 102 mph fastball to Alex Bregman, via Rob Friedman:

And, also courtesy of Friedman, an absurd three-pitch strikeout of Carlos Correa:

In theory, the biggest shortcoming for a guy with Eovaldi's stuff should be a tenuous relationship with the strike zone. In reality, he's always been the type to relentlessly attack the zone. So it went in 2018, during which he walked only 1.6 batters per nine innings.

Eovaldi saved his best performance for October. He walked only three batters and surrendered 15 hits. Pitching exclusively in high leverage, he permitted only one walk and four hits in relief over his last four appearances.

Despite Eovaldi's evolution and his monumental October statement, some teams may still look at him and see a guy whose body is too scarred to trust. Teams might also take issue with how he's not much of a strikeout artist. He whiffed only 7.9 batters per nine innings this campaign (including the postseason).

However, Eovaldi's huge upside is such that few, if any, other starters on the open market will be able to match it. 

If nothing else, he'll be the only accomplished starter younger than 30 available. Fellow free-agents-to-be like Dallas Keuchel, Gio Gonzalez, Lance Lynn and possibly Clayton Kershaw and David Price are past their primes. Patrick Corbin is coming off a better season than anyone else, but he has his downsides. 

Nobody should expect a nine-figure contract to come Eovaldi's way. But if last winter's market could conjure a $57 million deal for Alex Cobb, Eovaldi should do at least that well this winter. From there, he might have a shot at matching Ian Kennedy ($70 million) or Mike Leake ($80 million). Even Jeff Samardzija ($90 million) may not be out of reach.

As recently as May, it would have been unthinkable for Eovaldi to be worthy of such figures. But when a guy breaks out to the degree that he has, well, things change.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, Brooks Baseball and Baseball Savant.