It’s no secret that Aaron Nola had been struggling to find his groove for a while. After an injury-riddled 2025 in which he posted a 6.01 ERA across 17 starts, the 33-year-old right-hander posted a 6.04 ERA through the first 17 starts of his 2026 campaign.
Perhaps the low point of his season came on June 29, when Nola allowed eight runs across the fourth and fifth innings of a game against the Pirates in which he’d been handed a 5-0 lead. After that latest implosion, it would have been fair to ask whether the Phillies could afford to keep their longest-tenured player in the starting rotation.
But unexpectedly, it might have been with his very next start that his season began to turn around. On July 5 in Kansas City, Nola allowed just three runs in seven innings against the Royals for his longest start of the year.
Since then, Nola has seemingly only gotten better. In nine starts since the start of July, he has posted a 3.63 ERA, with 59 strikeouts across 52 innings pitched. Those nine starts include 12 home runs allowed, but nine of them have been solo shots.
Perhaps most promisingly, Nola has allowed a 2.51 ERA in his last five starts, dating back to July 28. His most recent game, against the Marlins on August 19, proved to be his best yet, as he allowed just one run across seven innings, striking out eight while walking none.
These are promising signs. But given Nola’s volatility in recent years, it’s worth examining what might explain this turnaround, and whether this improved play can be expected to continue.
Nola’s main problem in the first half of 2026 was that, despite boasting a knuckle curve that remains among the best pitches in baseball, his fastball and sinker had become two of the worst. This gave opposing batters the option to lay off the curveball, waiting for a misplaced fastball to attack. In order to improve, Nola would need his fastballs to improve (either in terms of movement or command), or he would need a new pitch besides the knuckle curve to offset the fastballs.
FanGraphs uses a model called Pitching+ to rate every pitch in baseball based on its stuff and location. A rating of 100 is league average, with higher ratings suggesting better performance, similar to offensive stats like OPS+. This model confirms that through June, Nola’s fastball and sinker were mediocre pitches, each rated 99 overall. But the model also indicates that both pitches actually had slightly above-average stuff. They were instead limited primarily by poor command, with sub-par Location+ scores of 95 given to each.
Since the start of July, the stuff for these pitches has remained steady, or even gone down a tick. But the placement of these pitches has improved pretty significantly. Since July 1, the Location+ scores for Nola’s fastball and sinker have been rated 108 and 106. His rarely-used cutter improved its Location+ even more dramatically, from 99 to 114. Nola’s improved command has again made all three of his fastball variations above-average pitches, at least over this sample size. With Pitching+ scores of 114, 103, and 107 for his fastball, sinker, and cutter over the last two months, there are now three plus pitches to complement Nola’s knuckle curve, where previously there were none.
But the most dramatic change in Nola’s starts might not be the quality of his pitches, but his approach. Through June, Nola threw his sinker 20.9% of the time. Since July, that rate has reduced to 14.2%. Meanwhile, he has thrown his changeup nearly twice as much since July as he did before, his use of the offspeed pitch increasing from 12.6% to 22.8%.
What’s strange about Nola’s increased changeup usage is that it’s his weakest pitch. What’s even stranger is that it seems to be working. Pitching+ gives Nola’s changeup this season a Stuff+ rating of 67, which ranks worst among 44 qualified pitchers. But it also gives his Location+ on the pitch a rating of 109, which ranks seventh-best among those same 44 pitchers.
What does this mean? There are two possibilities. One is that Nola is making greater use of a pitch that he can command better than any except his curveball. It could mean that he’s improving his pitch sequencing, and has found a dependable weapon to pair with his fastball to keep hitters on their toes.
The other possibility is that Nola is increasingly relying on a sub-par pitch, and that hitters may adjust once they learn to look out for it. And when they do, Nola may be forced to reduce his changeup usage and return to square one on the question of offsetting his fastball.
Aaron Nola’s future remains up in the air. His curveball is still a weapon – that much is known. Very little else is. His fastball command has improved. Will it stay that way? He is still allowing too many home runs. Is this bad luck on fly balls, as some advanced metrics suggest? Or is it a sign that something still isn’t right?
There is only one person who can answer these questions. And every fifth day for these last 30 games of the season, he will answer them a little bit more.
