NEW YORK (AP) — Nathan Eovaldi certainly has the New York Yankees' number — even if nobody else does lately.
The veteran right-hander cooled off Aaron Judge & Co. for the second time in eight days Wednesday night, pitching eight masterful innings for the Texas Rangers in their 6-1 victory.
“That’s the tough part, right? We don’t really do this very often, where we have to face that same team back-to-back starts," Eovaldi said. "Fortunately for me the last
time it was a good one. I know I threw a lot of splitters and cutters. Today with the curveball being as effective as it was, it just allowed me to I guess rely on that pitch a little bit more, but also keep doing what was working before.”
Eovaldi threw 31 curveballs — his most in a game since 2019 with Boston, manager Skip Schumaker noted.
“The last two outings with Evo have been fantastic. I mean, today was exactly what we needed and hoped for against a really good lineup,” Schumaker said. “I thought there was a chance he'd go the distance, but I wasn't going to push him with a five-run lead.”
The 36-year-old Eovaldi, a two-time All-Star who pitched for the Yankees from 2015-16, struck out a season-best eight and walked none, firing 72 of his 101 pitches for strikes. He allowed just three hits after tossing seven innings of four-hit ball in a 3-0 win over New York on April 29 at home.
"He was fooling ’em all night,” said catcher Kyle Higashioka, who spent 2017-23 with the Yankees. “He just uses all his pitches in a manner that just keeps people guessing, forcing them to commit hard or soft. I think it’s just, his stuff lends itself to really keeping guys off balance. He's always a tough at-bat and he really knows how to pitch. He’s got a great capacity for that. So I mean, it’s no surprise to me he shut ’em down twice.”
Each splendid performance snapped a three-game slide for Texas. In between, the American League-leading Yankees (25-12) scored 46 runs while going 5-0 against the Orioles and Rangers.
“You know how good that team is over there. Their game planning is elite, so you have to mix it up. You cannot get into patterns," Schumaker said. "I didn’t know what he was throwing, either. I mean, his game plan, he has such good feel for swings and what the hitters are trying to sit on. So, there’s a game plan but then he also goes out there and he can navigate a game on his own as good as anybody based on what he’s seeing. And that’s the part of the game that sometimes gets lost today, right?”
Eovaldi became the first Rangers pitcher to last longer than seven innings this year and improved to 5-2 with a 2.22 ERA in his last 11 starts against the Yankees since April 8, 2022.
“That’s the biggest thing for me is, I enjoy the challenge. I want to face the best teams, and I want to go out there and attack the zone as best I can,” Eovaldi said.
“I played here in Yankee Stadium enough to know like, how big the crowd plays into effect, how they can get the players going. It’s one of those things about being able to pitch on the road is just being able to try to take the crowd out of the game.”
New York had won eight in a row at home.
“They’re a good-hitting team, so they’re going to come out and learn from the last game, because he threw fantastic against them last week," Higashioka said. "They’re going to learn from that and they’re going to make adjustments, so we have to kind of figure out a way to mitigate that without straying too far from Evo’s strengths. So, he did a great job adjusting.”
Eovaldi thought he mixed his pitches well and said it helped that the Rangers scored early, building a 4-0 lead by the third behind homers from Corey Seager and Evan Carter.
That allowed Eovaldi to "just try to stay on the attack the whole time,” he said.
The only blip came when Judge hit his major league-best 15th homer with two outs in the sixth for the Yankees, who had won five straight games and 15 of 17. But that merely trimmed the margin to 6-1, and Eovaldi retired his final seven batters after that.
“It was an amazing outing," Schumaker said.
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