The Mets need several starting pitchers, and Eovaldi was solid over the past two years in Texas.
As the Mets build out a starting rotation for the 2025 season and beyond, we continue to look at free agent pitchers who might be able to give them quality innings. Coming off a pair of pretty good seasons with the Texas Rangers, 34-year-old Nathan Eovaldi is a free agent, having declined his $20 million player option for the 2025 season.
In his two seasons with Texas, Eovaldi made a total of 54 starts and threw 314.2 innings with a 3.72 ERA and a 3.86 FIP. And he struck out 23.4 percent of opposing batters, which is neither great nor terrible, but managed to walk just 7.0 percent of them—a better-than-average rate for a starting pitcher across those two seasons.
It’s been quite a while since Eovaldi pitched for a team in the National League East. After starting his big league career with the Dodgers in 2011, he was traded to the Marlins in the Hanley Ramirez deal in 2012 and went on to log 369.0 innings across 63 starts with the Marlins between the trade and the end of the 2014 season.
From there, he spent two season with the Yankees, accumulating a not-so-great 4.45 ERA in his time with the team before needing a second Tommy John surgery late in the 2016 season. The Rays scooped him up shortly after that, and once he recovered and made it back to the mound in 2018, he made ten starts for Tampa before getting traded to the Red Sox.
Eovaldi’s stint in Boston wound up being the longest one he’s spent with a single team, as he remained with the Red Sox through the end of the 2022 season. And his last three seasons there looked pretty much like the two that he just put up with the Rangers, as he had a 3.79 ERA and a 3.43 FIP from 2020 through 2022.
While his performance has been pretty steady for several years now, the biggest concern with Eovaldi lately has been durability. While he’s thrown at least 100 innings in all four of the past four seasons, his single-season totals have been 182.1, 109.1, 144.0, and 170.2 innings, respectively. Given his age and that track record, it’s unlikely that he’ll land a huge contract, but given the terms of the option that he declined, he clearly thinks he can do better than a one-year, $20 million deal in free agency.
The median crowdsourced projections at FanGraphs have Eovaldi landing a three-year, $60 million contract, which seems a bit high. That’s exactly the same projection that Sean Manaea received by the same measure, and as we saw during his 2024 season with the Mets, Manaea’s ceiling appears to be quite a bit higher than Eovaldi’s.
Still, though, the Mets could certainly do worse than Eovaldi, and the team’s rotation is currently a little on the shaky side beyond Kodai Senga—who only made a handful of appearances and one start that lasted more than five innings in 2024—and David Peterson.