2025 Fantasy Baseball Week 7 Trade Values: It may be time to sell high on Nathan Eovaldi

The term “sell-high candidate” implies something in a Fantasy Baseball context. People often read it to mean, “This player isn’t good, trade him for anything while you can,” but of course, that’s an extremely un-nuanced reading. A player can be good and also be a sell-high candidate. It just means they probably aren’t as good as they appear in the moment. 

Take Nathan Eovaldi, for example. Very little about his current production screams “sell-high.” I mean, sure, his 2.03 ERA isn’t backed up by his underlying skills, but his 3.50 xERA is hardly something you need to run from – it’s the 25th-best mark among starting pitchers, and with names like Landen Roupp, Eduardo Rodriguez, Tyler Anderson, and JP Sears ahead of him who don’t seem particularly likely to sustain that, I don’t have much trouble saying that Eovaldi is probably a top-20 starting pitcher for Fantasy right now.

He’s done it by reinventing himself as a pitcher, reacting to his lower fastball velocity by simply throwing that pitch less often than ever before – he’s down to a 29.6% usage rate with his four-seamer, and with no sinker in his arsenal anymore, he’s basically become 70% “secondaries” pitcher. And it’s working, with his splitter and curveball both generating tons of whiffs and weak contact, and his cutter supplementing his fastball well enough. 

The other thing that makes it easier to buy into Eovaldi’s early-season success than some others is that he almost always gets off to strong starts to the season:

Nathan Eovaldi’s first-half ERA

• 2024: 2.97
• 2023: 2.83
• 2022: 3.34
• 2021: 3.66

Eovaldi’s success so far is “real,” in that the underlying skill set and track record back it up. This isn’t a fluke, Eovaldi is actually this good. 

He’s also a sell-high candidate. Because his history tells us that, eventually, he’ll stop pitching this well.

The point of stats like xERA – or even the less sophisticated ERA estimators like FIP or xFIP that have been around even longer – is to try to cut through the inherent noise in pitching results and try to identify something approximating a pitcher’s “true” talent level. That’s the point of the entire advanced stats movement, from Bill James’ groundbreaking work nearly 40 years ago right through to the latest research being done online these days. 

But there’s something we have to keep in mind with all of these stats: Talent level isn’t static. Players make tweaks to their arsenal in response to – or in anticipation of – changes in their underlying talent level, like we’re seeing with Eovaldi, whose once-blazing fastball is now roughly average in velocity. Sometimes, guys are just locked in – like Ranger Suarez early last season, who didn’t really change his pitch mix and wasn’t throwing harder than usual, but was just executing at a high level for a few months. Sometimes, guys are just slumping. 

In Eovaldi’s case, for as impressive as he has been in the first half of seasons lately, he has pretty consistently fallen apart in the end:

Nathan Eovaldi’s second-half ERA

• 2024: 4.81
• 2023: 7.18
• 2022: 4.91
• 2021: 3.87

Sometimes, it’s an injury that sends Eovaldi’s season spiraling, but that wasn’t the case last season. He just faded, losing a bit of velocity on his four-seamer and a lot of effectiveness on that and the cutter especially. 

The increased focus on the curveball and splitter in the early going could be designed to avoid that issue this season, and maybe it’ll work. But one thing you often see with older pitchers is decreased focus on their fastball until they reach a point where they just can’t realistically adjust anymore. I don’t think Eovaldi necessarily has that problem right now, but I do wonder what the adjustment will be if and when things go sideways at some point in the future.

Which they almost certainly will. That’s just been the way Eovaldi’s seasons have gone for the past half-decade. Which creates a world in which, if we were ranking starting pitchers based on how confident I am in their next start, I would probably put Eovaldi in the top 20 right now; but if we’re ranking for the rest of the season (as we are), you have to account for some degree of regression from this point.

The biggest question is, how long can he hold on? Can you count on two more excellent months from Eovaldi? Three? At some point, it makes sense to start looking to sell high on Eovaldi, but I’m not sure that point is right now. But if you wait too long and he starts to regress before you’ve moved him, you run the risk of missing the sell window.

For now, I’m looking to hold Eovaldi but will be looking into some sell-high moves in the next month or so. But it also depends on what the rest of your staff looks like. Eovaldi went late enough in drafts that he might be relatively superfluous to your specific team, to the point where it might make a lot of sense to look at moving him right now for someone like Spencer Strider, who should be more valuable from June through September. 

But attrition hits hard at the starting pitcher position, and moving a healthy, effective starting pitcher is always a risk. Eovaldi seems likely to fall apart at some point, but that’s true of most pitchers. If you can’t move him for someone you are sure is a difference-maker in the long run, hanging on to Eovaldi makes plenty of sense. You’ll have other chances to sell high. Until those opportunities run out. 

H2H Trade Values Chart

Roto Trade Values Chart