Jesús Luzardo stepped off of the mound Tuesday after six innings feeling good about his outing. Though he took the loss on the night, he did so only allowing two runs to score, limiting the impact of on-base traffic across several innings.
“I feel like I kept us in the fight,” Luzardo said to reporters after the game. “Got through a tough fourth there, didn’t let it spiral out of control. We had some traffic throughout the game, but I feel like we handled it pretty well.”
The outing marked Luzardo’s fifth quality start of the season and his second consecutive. While his ERA still sits higher than the Phillies would like, Luzardo’s recent stretch has continued to paint the picture of a pitcher performing far better than the surface-level numbers suggest.
Just over a month ago, Luzardo walked off the Citizens Bank Park mound at a season low. Getting into two separate jams with multiple baserunners against the Chicago Cubs, Luzardo left the game in the top of the sixth after allowing a bases-loaded double to Matt Shaw. He allowed four runs on the inning, nine on the day. His ERA rose to 7.94.
It seemed a lot of Luzardo’s problems stemmed from a change of approach when pitching from the stretch.
“All my throws in between starts are out of the stretch,” Luzardo said to reporters after the April 15 contest. “It’s something that we’ve got to fix ASAP. It’s not tipping, so it’s got to be something else. Whether it’s pitch usage or... I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate. I kind of want to dive deeper into it.”
Since that fateful outing, Luzardo has begun to turn things around. Since that game, he’s pitched 33 innings across six starts. A 2.73 ERA over that stretch has brought his season average down to 4.85.
He has still had trouble spots emerge, like his start against the Rockies on May 8. Luzardo lasted three-plus innings in that start, allowing six runs. Still, those six make up sixty percent of his runs allowed since April 15, indicating the outing as the exception, not the rule.
Hidden beneath the 4.85 ERA, however, is a layer of statistics indicating there is still room to grow. Luzardo’s 2.88 FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and 3.17 xERA (expected ERA) indicate that his early season struggles are a bit more bad luck than bad pitching.
His .363 BABIP is 60 points higher than his career .309 mark, indicating that he is seeing more contact from opposing hitters. When compared to his 28 percent strikeout rate, on par with his performance in 2025, it seems as if Luzardo’s opposition has been finding the right spots with their batted balls, a trend likely to regress back to Luzardo’s standard as the season moves forward.
After his start versus the Cubs on April 15, Luzardo indicated that he seemed to know where the problem was, now he just needed to find a solution. Before the game on Tuesday, interim manager Don Mattingly gave his take on what has been plaguing Luzardo.
“I think sometimes he speeds up,” Mattingly explained. “And I've talked about this a few times now. But instead of just slowing down a little bit, making pitches, it gets to be ‘I’m competing and I'm competing harder.’ And then it’s to me, not as good. So just keeping himself under control when things spiral just a little bit.”
Tuesday’s outing saw a lot of what Luzardo had struggled with coming back his way. For the better part of two seasons now, Luzardo’s struggles have come with runners on base. Once upon a time, pitch tipping was in the realm of possibility. The current theory is much simpler: he has been losing control himself. And he is finding his way out of that dilemma.
The first sign of this came in the third inning Tuesday. After allowing the first two batters to reach on a single and double, Luzardo kept his composure, forcing Ke’Bryan Hayes into a 4-6-3 double play to regain control of the inning. He then worked Matt McLain into a groundout to end the inning.
Two innings later, a lead-off triple from Elly De La Cruz that skirted just by Justin Crawford put Luzardo In a dangerous situation. He enduced a grounder from Spencer Steer right to a charging Bryce Harper, but Luzardo failed to cover first base, allowing Steer to reach. To make matters worse, Sal Stewart walked after initially being rung out on a 2-2 pitch.
With all of the little things going wrong, this inning had the makings of an incoming blowout for the Miami native.
Instead, Luzardo battled. He allowed two runs to score on consecutive sacrifice flies, and struck out Blake Dunn for the final out before more damage could be done.
He allowed a single baserunner in each of his two remaining innings against the Reds, but wrapped up the day well. While Luzardo took the loss statistically, he did his job and kept his team in the game.
A lot of the damage done to Luzardo this season has been off of his fastball selection - his four-seamer and sinker. In response to this, Luzardo has been trusting his off-speed pitches a lot more in his sweeper and change-up. He’s gone off-speed nearly 60 percent of the time in his pitch selection, keeping batters off-balance in tandem with his fastball topping 97 mph.
The resulting change has seen his WHIP decrease from 1.46 in his first four games to 1.21 in the six games since April 15. On the season, his WHIP has averaged out to 1.31, still the highest he has seen since 2021.
As Luzardo’s pitch selection works to decrease the total baserunners he allows, his work to slow down when there are baserunners will become even easier.
It’s still early on in the 2026 season. If Luzardo continues down this path, he could find himself in a similar place to the end of 2025 when he received votes in the National League Cy Young race, ending seventh in the final tally.
