Reversing Course (Again) On Jesús Luzardo

If the Marlins are going to jump into playoff contention anytime soon, it will be on the back of their young pitchers. Of these, they have assembled many, with varied results. Sandy Alcantara just won the Cy Young. Trevor Rogers looked like a future Cy Young winner for a little bit, though not so much anymore. Max Meyer got hurt but should be back soon enough. Sixto Sánchez got hurt and might not be the back ever. The Marlins even declared a surplus in this area, trading Pablo López (and Zac Gallen, if you want to broaden your time horizons a little) for position players. Braxton Garrett, Edward Cabrera, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But Miami’s most promising young starter at the moment, other than Alcantara, is Jesús Luzardo. He faces the Phillies on Tuesday night having allowed just one earned run in 12 2/3 innings over his first two starts of the season.

Luzardo is a pitcher I’ve had my eye on for a long time, but he’s been out of the spotlight so long it’s worth recounting his backstory. Born in Peru and raised in Florida, Luzardo was a third-round pick of the Nationals out of high school in 2016. He was a bit undersized at 6-foot, but he was very polished for a high school pitcher and rocketed up draft lists when he underwent the same kind of metamorphosis that made Shane Bieber, Jacob deGrom, and Corbin Burnes into Cy Young winners: Already having plus command, he developed a plus fastball in the pros. Even now, left-handed starters who can throw in the upper 90s are rare. Left-handed starters with multiple above-average-to-plus secondaries and a good sense of how to pitch… those come along just a few times a decade.

For a time, it looked like Luzardo might break camp with the A’s at 21 and immediately become the best starting pitcher on a contender, so great was his talent at such a young age. I was all-in on him as a future Cy Young winner, but just before the start of the 2019 season, he suffered a strained rotator cuff. That started the typical up-and-down emotional journey that you know if you’ve ever gotten attached to a pitching prospect: Injuries, intermittent effectiveness, inexplicable pitfalls. Here, I made a chart:

But after a promising half-season in 2022, Luzardo is pitching like a bona fide ace, at least for the first two weeks of the season. And his tiny ERA is not just the result of good batted ball luck or anything; he’s striking out 31.3% of batters, holding opponents to an xwOBA of just .234.

After so many ups and downs, is Luzardo’s potential still in there? He’s been around so long that he pitched for an Oakland team that won 97 games; surely anyone that old must be pushing 30 by now. But no, he’s still only 25. He was in the same high school draft class as Nick Lodolo, who just made his MLB debut last year.

Even with the tools we have, a two-start sample barely constitutes evidence. Plus, I’ve had the football pulled away at the last second so many times with young Marlins pitchers — not just Luzardo, but I was a huge fan of Meyer, Rogers, and Sanchez when they were coming up — that it’s going to take a lot to convince me this is going to last. But damn, he looks good so far.

So I thought it would be fun to go back to the pitcher Luzardo was when I viewed him as a future Cy Young contender and compare that to the guy who mowed down the Mets and Twins over the first week of the season. The FanGraphs Top 100 prospect report on Luzardo from 2019, written by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel, was positive but a little more conservative than my less refined view, ranking him 27th and giving him a Future Value of 55. Obviously Luzardo has been through a lot in the past four years, but I wanted to go back to Eric and Kiley’s report and see just how much has changed.

Here’s the relevant passage:

Those crafty pitchability traits from high school are still extant. Luzardo will vary the shape of his breaking ball — he can throw it for strikes to get ahead of hitters, he can back foot it to righties — and he uses his changeup against lefties and righties. His delivery is a bit violent but it doesn’t inhibit his command, and Luzardo’s musculature seems better able to deal with the effort than it was when he was in high school. His fastball may not play like a mid-90s heater because he is undersized and a short-strider, but he locates it well enough to avoid getting hurt.

Let’s go through those traits one at a time. First, Luzardo’s breaking ball. He does vary its shape and velocity quite a bit, ranging from 82.6 mph to 88.7. This isn’t a Brent Honeywell Jr.-type changeup/screwball confusion between two distinct pitches; the histogram of Luzardo’s slider velocity isn’t a perfect bell curve, but it’s close. The mean and median velocities are within 0.1 mph of one another

Still, you’ll see a slow slider with a little more loop, seen back-doored here to Willi Castro for a called strike:

As well as a harder, flatter slider, seen here generating a checked swing from Tomás Nido, who likely thought it was going to be a fastball low in the zone:

Last season, Luzardo threw both his slider and his changeup more or less equally to both-handed batters. But this season, that’s changed. It’s only been two starts, and he’s only thrown 39 pitches to lefties total, but not a single one of them has been a changeup so far. That could change, but lefties teed off against Luzardo’s change last year (.308/.338/.538, .440 xwOBA) so maybe it’s not a bad idea to give it a rest.

The second half of the scouting report remains spot-on. Luzardo’s delivery is a blur of limbs; not to jinx things, but seeing that much activity from a pitcher his size always brings my mind back to Carson Fulmer. Like Fulmer, Luzardo exemplifies the difference between being short and being small. Built like a rugby fullback, he still doesn’t get much extension; thanks to his stature and delivery, he’s in the third percentile among MLB pitchers this year, ruining an otherwise blood-red set of patriotic lollipops.

But something else has changed: He’s throwing harder than ever.

Both of Luzardo’s fastballs (four-seamer and sinker) are up a mile an hour over what he was throwing in 2022, when he — it bears repeating — was really good. His four-seamer is up almost two miles per hour over 2020. (In 2019, he operated exclusively out of the bullpen.) As of this writing, he has the second-hardest four-seamer of any left-handed starter, behind only Shane McClanahan, and even then only by 0.1 mph. The implications of such a velo jump are obvious: Where he was once working in the mid-90s, Luzardo can now tickle 99, creating a gap of some 17 mph between his hardest fastball and slowest slider.

Luzardo is about to face a Phillies lineup that scored nine runs on Alcantara as I was writing this article, so the competition is not about to get any easier. If this is a two-start mirage or if he gets hurt again, it was fun while it lasted. But if he can rekindle the old magic, and then some, he’ll be one of the best pitchers in baseball.