Jerad Eickhoff Has Less Velocity Than Almost Anyone, Still Wins

Gabe Kapler perhaps said it best following Jerad Eickhoff's third consecutive stellar outing for the Phillies this year: "He's kind of a throwback," the manager told reporters.

Indeed, in an age of fireballer hurlers, an age where pitchers are throwing harder and harder, getting injured more often, and lasting fewer and fewer innings, Eickhoff, 28, is an anomaly. His average pitch is just 83.3 miles per hour, according to StatCast. That puts him at 476th of around 500 pitchers in the league.

His spin rate — which measures how many revolutions per minute his average ball takes — is in the elite tier, at 32nd overall. It bodes well for those who think Eickhoff might be coming back from the injury that hampered him in 2017 and 2018 as even more than a mid-rotation man.

"He's not a 2019 pitcher," Kapler told MLB.com's Todd Zolecki. "He's super crafty. It's changing speeds, it's location over velocity, it's throwing a ball when he wants to throw a ball."

Some other names immediately before and after Eickhoff on that spin rate list: Justin Verlander, Yu Darvish, Gerrit Cole, Clayton Kershaw, and Walker Buehler. In other words, the best curveballers in the game.

Advanced metrics show that Eickhoff's hot start is no fluke. To complement his 2.12 ERA over three appearances and 17 innings thus far, Eickhoff also sports a 1.66 fielding independent pitching (FIP) mark, which is essentially a predictor of performance when factoring in fielding and bad luck. Throw in 20 strikeouts to just 5 walks, and things really couldn't be going any better for the right-hander.

Eickhoff's curve ball is particularly gnarly, and it's a large part of his revamped approach following a nerve issue that sidelined him for almost all of 2018 and hampered him significantly in 2017. The injury left him with reduced velocity, which he's had to compromise for with pinpoint accuracy and even more devastating breaking pitches.

Even for pitchers who can spin the ball he does, most of them can throw harder, which means Eickhoff must find even more ways to get hitters out. It's an approach in the style of Hall of Famer Greg Maddux or Chicago Cubs workhorse Kyle Hendricks, one that may not yield 20-strikeout games but instead induces tons of soft contact, weak groundballs, and frustrated hitters. And it's not an approach that many can pull off.

Before the 2017-2018 injuries, Eickhoff had impressed in the previous two seasons, having come over from the Texas Rangers in the Cole Hamels trade. He's now arguably the most important piece from that deal, with Jorge Alfaro since traded in the J.T. Realmuto deal and Nick Williams, for the time being at least, relegated to a bench role.

Eickhoff didn't make the rotation to start the year, but soon got his chance when Nick Pivetta's struggles did not abate. Now, with Eickhoff throwing as well as anyone on the Phillies roster, the team looks to be facing a good problem once Pivetta can figure things out in the minor leagues.