Baseball is a world full of superstitions. Rally caps. On deck circle rituals. Lucky shirts worn under game jerseys. Each franchise is filled with them and sometimes they are large enough in scope that they encompass an entire season. The San Francisco Giants had a stretch where they competed for a World Series every other year, and Aaron Nola is now battling his own "every other year" stigma.
Since 2017, the starting pitcher has seemed to go back and forth between good seasons and seasons where his ratios or strikeouts take a step backward. Most recently, Nola followed up a strong COVID-shortened 2020 season with a decline in strikeout rate and a 4.63 ERA in 2021. Then he bounced back with a career-best season in 2022 before struggling to a 4.46 ERA and another drop in strikeout rate in 2023. Last year, Nola seemed to take a small step forward again with his ERA and hard contact allowed, but the early stages of the 2025 season have not been kind to the veteran.
Through five starts, the 31-year-old has a 6.43 ERA and 1.61 WHIP with 34 hits allowed and a 31:11 K:BB ratio in 27 innings. While it would be easy to write this off as another step backward, as dictated by the "every other year" superstition, there might be another, simpler answer to why Nola has struggled to start the season.
"Keeping guys off free passes," the veteran said two days after his last start against the Mets. In that outing, Nola walked two batters and struck out six while allowing seven hits and four earned runs in 6.1 innings. Although, two of the runners who came around to score did so after Nola had been removed from the game.
"I have to focus on the small things that I usually do, which is to get the leadoff hitter out, first pitch strikes, and walks," he continued. "I had two [walks] the other night, but the past two games before that, I had four each game, which is kind of unacceptable for me. I'm not a guy who usually walks a lot of guys in my career. That's not really me."
For his career, Nola has a 6.4% walk rate or 2.36 walks per nine innings. This season, his walk rate is 8.7%, which has equated to 3.54 walks per nine innings. As Nola alluded to, a large portion of that can be attributed to his lack of success early in the count. This season, Nola has a 56.3% first-pitch strike rate, which is not only 10% lower than last season but also 10% lower than his career mark.
If you look at True First Pitch Strike Rate, which takes the swings and called strikes in 0-0 counts but removes balls in play so that it measures every time a pitcher gets to an 0-1 count, Nola has a 46.8% mark right now, which is far-and-away the worst of his career and is considerably worse than his 55% career rate. That has led to Nola pitching from behind in the count more than he has in any season since 2019.
"At the end of the day," said Nola, "it all comes down to command and getting ahead of [hitters]. Pitching is a lot easier when you do that. You have more options when you do that."
The flip side of that statement is that falling behind in the count limits the options that a pitcher has and makes things harder. With Nola falling behind in the count more often, he can't nibble at the corners or try and get hitters to chase as the at-bat goes on because he runs the risk of giving up a free pass. When that happens, as Nola himself said, "Those guys usually score, and they have. I think almost all the walks that I've had this year, scored or led to some runs."
I went back and looked at the 11 batters Nola has walked this season to see if his feeling was correct. Of his 11 walks on the season, six of those either directly led to a run or eventually came around to score, so even if it's not "almost all," that's almost a third of the runs he's allowed this season behind tied back to free passes.
When pitchers fall behind in the count, hitters can also get more aggressive on pitches in the strike zone, so even if Nola can avoid issuing a walk when he falls behind in the count, he is still facing too many hitters who are in counts where they feel they can do damage on anything in the strike zone.
"That's a really big thing for me," he explained, "to go at guys as best as possible. Obviously, not serve it up over the middle, but to get myself in better counts to where I can make better pitches, more quality pitches. There's the ones that I've thrown over the middle that [hitters] just haven't missed so far, and sometimes that's just how it goes."
In some sense, he's right. Nola isn't throwing more pitches down the middle than he has in years past. Statcast has him throwing 27% of his pitches in the Heart of the strike zone, which is in line with his season-long numbers from the last four seasons. The issue is that he's currently sporting a -4 Run Value on pitches in the Heart of the zone after posing a +4 Run Value on pitches there last year.
Some of that can also be attributed to Nola falling behind in the count so often. Hitters are getting into positive counts more often, and when Nola does miss over the heart of the plate, they're waiting to do damage. Nola has given up a higher rate of pulled fly balls than he ever has, and his 33% HR/FB rate is obviously inflated by small sample size, but a good indicator that hitters are making the most of their contact off of Nola right now.
Another reason that hitters are having such success against Nola can be connected back to something even more basic: "My velocity has been down," admitted Nola. "When the fastball velocity is down, usually all the other pitches are down a little bit."
The veteran is sitting right at 90 mph with his sinker through five starts, which is the lowest mark of his career. However, he doesn't believe the issue is connected to anything mechanical or health-related. "It's early season ramping up," he suggested. "Every season, I kind of start out at lower velocity. When it starts to warm up, [the velocity] usually starts to tick up. It's just probably a little more prevalent right now because I'm not having a great start to the season. But, I mean, that's kind of how it's usually been to start off the season."
Through his first nine starts in 2024, Nola averaged 90.8 mph on his sinker and then sat 91.9 mph in his final 21 starts. In 2023, Nola's sinker was 90.8 mph in his first eight starts and then sat at 92.2 mph in his final 20 games. So even though the 90 mph mark is lower than what we've seen the last two years, Nola's velocity has indeed climbed as the season has gone on, and it's fair to assume that we'll see the same this year.
If that velocity does start to come back, there are some positive developments for Nola this season that may start to shine a bit more.
One of them has been the location of his sinker. Even though the sinker velocity hasn't been good, it's inducing 15% more groundballs and giving up a lot less hard contact. Some of that could be because he's getting the pitch in on the hands of right-handed batters more often. His inside location to right-handers is up 10% from last season, up to 47.3% on the year.
"I'm trying to jam the inside a little bit more," Nola admitted, although it does seem to be game-dependent. "The other day, that sinker in to righties felt better than glove side, so we just kind of stayed with that. Some games that gloveside feels really good and armside doesn't, so you just kind of have to go in with a plan every single game, and, obviously, it changes depending on what's going on in the game and how I'm feeling with certain pitches."
That flexible approach also makes sense for a veteran like Nola, who has a good understanding of his pitches. His willingness to attack inside on righties is a positive development, even if it's not one he'll force every game.
Another positive development has been the increased success of Nola's curveball in two-strike counts. So far this season, Nola has a 51% chase rate on his curveball in two-strike counts and has posted a 26.5% PutAway Rate on the pitch, which measures how often a two-strike pitch results in a strikeout. Those marks are up from a 39% two-strike chase rate and 22% PutAway rate last year.
"Chase rate, for me, comes with the location," Nola explained. "I mean, I've thrown a lot of curveballs. The curveball is usually my out pitch over the years, and if I can locate that, I feel like I can get some swing and misses on that one."
This season, Nola is doing a tremendous job of locating his curveball low in the zone and has thrived with the pitch when he's able to get into favorable counts. He just needs to keep working on getting ahead in the count so that he can put himself in those favorable situations.
"The more reps I get, the more comfortable I'll get with the release," he theorized. "I just gotta keep working on it every day and try to get back to being really sharp...That's not saying I'm not gonna walk anybody else for the rest of the year, but I'll try to do that, for sure. There's a difference between an aggressive walk and a nonaggressive walk, and, for me, an aggressive walk is trying to be around the plate and making good pitches, and, you know, if they lay off good pitches, they lay off pitches, but really trying to be on the attack mode is a big component."
At this point in his eight-year career, Nola has earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to understanding himself and what he needs to do to be successful. However, being in the game as long as he has can sometimes work against you at times too.
"Some things have changed [over the years] just because I've faced teams and guys a lot of times now," Nola admitted. "This just comes with pitching a lot...I've seen a lot of guys a lot of times and thrown a lot of pitches, and so they've seen all my stuff." That means Nola can sometimes try to adapt in ways that wind up not being successful, but it also means his margin for error is much smaller because there are fewer ways he can trick his opponents.
Without the element of surprise, Nola's path to success comes back to one answer: "Command is obviously number one."
By taking back command of the strike zone early in counts, the veteran can hopefully reassert command of the 2025 season. There are enough statistical indicators early in the season that suggest that Nola might be a better pitcher than the version of him we saw last year if his velocity starts ticking back up and he can go back to getting ahead in counts. While that may not be an ace-level pitcher in fantasy baseball anymore, it could still be a valuable one that you may be able to buy low on in your leagues.