PHILADELPHIA -- Aaron Nola has made a career out of being the guy you can pencil in. Every fifth day. Every season. The Phillies have lived on that reliability for a decade — and then 2025 happened.
Nola made just 17 starts, missed more than three months, and finished with a career-worst 6.01 ERA. The injuries were the headline: a right ankle sprain put him on the IL in mid-May, and a stress fracture in a right rib followed during the rehab process. For a pitcher whose durability has been almost unnerving — his 2025 season even included his first non-COVID IL stint since 2017 — the lost summer didn’t just erase innings. It disrupted the one thing Nola usually controls: the steady rhythm of his craft.
So the path back in 2026 isn’t some mysterious reinvention. It’s a checklist — and it starts with simply staying on the mound.
“Body feels good. I’m 100%, finally,” Nola said late last season, after the long grind of trying to pitch through a year that never fully settled. If that sounds like an ordinary quote, it’s because Nola’s problems haven’t usually been dramatic. They’ve been incremental: a little less life, a little less finish, a few more mistakes that don’t get fouled back anymore.
The clearest place it showed up was the four-seam fastball — the pitch that has always had to play a little above its radar-gun reading because Nola lives on command, not intimidation. In 2024, his four-seamer averaged 92.5 mph; in 2025 it was 91.9. Batters hit .167 and slugged .316 off it in 2024; they hit .230 and slugged .529 in 2025. Even the whiff rate collapsed, from 23.0% to 13.9%.
That’s not just a “fastball got hit” problem. That’s a “fastball stopped setting up everything else” problem — because when hitters don’t have to respect that pitch at the top of the zone, they can wait longer, see the curveball longer, and do damage when Nola leaks one over the plate.
Rob Thomson’s most telling line about Nola last year wasn’t about results. It was about the one thing Nola needs back to be Nola: “Today was really encouraging to me, just because of fastball command,” the manager said after a September start. “Velocity was up, and he held it for most of the game.”
But command alone won’t be enough if the ball keeps leaving the yard.
Nola has wrestled with home runs for years — 32 in 2023, 30 in 2024 — and in 2025 it got louder: 18 homers allowed in just 94 1/3 innings, a 1.72 HR/9 rate that ranked among the worst for pitchers who reached 90 innings. His ground-ball rate, once routinely above 50% from 2016–19, dipped to 42.9% in 2025. That’s the danger zone at Citizens Bank Park: too many balls in the air, too many pulled, and too many that don’t come back.
And then there’s the quality of contact — the sneaky stat that tells you when a pitcher’s “bad luck” isn’t actually luck. Nola posted career-worst marks in barrel rate (9.1%), average exit velocity (89.4 mph), and hard-hit rate (43.3%). For context, his career hard-hit rate sits at 35.6% on FanGraphs. That gap is the story: hitters weren’t just getting to him; they were squaring him up.
The good news — and it matters — is that the larger body of work is still excellent. Nola’s career line remains that of a top-of-the-rotation fixture: 109–89, 3.83 ERA, 1,876 strikeouts. The mission for 2026 is to make 2025 the outlier again: stay healthy, get the four-seamer back to being a weapon, trade some of those airballs for grounders, and shave the hard contact back toward his normal.
Because if Nola does that, he doesn’t just “bounce back.” He restores the one thing the Phillies have counted on for years — the comfort of knowing the fifth day is covered.
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