ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — One of baseball's best pitchers this season isn't even listed among the league leaders, and was left off the American League All-Star team.
Nathan Eovaldi is 6-0 with a 0.47 ERA in six starts for the Texas Rangers since the beginning of July. The right-hander, coming off one-hit ball over eight innings in a 2-0 win over the New York Yankees, is 10-3 with a 1.38 ERA in 19 starts overall.
“I don’t know what else I can say about him. I’ve run out of superlatives,” Texas manager Bruce Bochy said. “This is one of the best runs I’ve seen from a pitcher. Believe me, I’ve enjoyed watching it.”
And Bochy, also a former big league catcher, has seen a lot in 28 seasons as a manager while winning 2,231 regular-season games and four World Series titles.
Eovaldi would qualify as MLB's official ERA leader, by more than a half-run better than both All-Star starters, had he not missed most of June with elbow inflammation.
Pittsburgh's Paul Skenes lowered his NL-best ERA to 1.94 with six scoreless innings against Cincinnati on Thursday night, when the wild card-chasing Rangers had only their second off day in three weeks since the All-Star break. The AL leader is reigning Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal at 2.18 for Detroit.
“It's just kind of been building off the previous outings,” Eovaldi said. “I'm going out there trying to make sure that I'm mixing up my pitches, and trying to keep them off balance as much as I can.”
Only four MLB pitchers since 1920 had a lower ERA than Eovaldi in the first 19 starts of a season, with Bob Gibson's 1.06 for St. Louis the lowest in 1968, the season the Hall of Famer won both the NL Cy Young and MVP awards. Gibson also allowed one or zero runs 13 times in a 14-game span that year, and was the only pitcher since 1900 to do that until Evoaldi's current streak, according to STATS.
Eovaldi's 111 innings pitched are five shy of qualifying as the league leader after 116 games for the Rangers — pitchers need one inning per team game. If the Rangers stick to their rotation, he could get to 120 innings in their 120th game Monday against Arizona with another complete game — he threw a four-hit shutout April 1 at Cincinnati in his second start this season.
This is already his third consecutive 10-win season since joining his home state team, and last December signed a new $75 million, three-year contract through 2027. The 35-year-old Eovaldi and Hall of Fame strikeout king Nolan Ryan are the only big league players from Alvin, Texas.
While Ryan was a flamethrower, Eovaldi has a mix of pitches: four-seam fastball, cutter, split-finger and curveball.
“He's probably using the mix even more than he has in the past. He’s comfortable with any pitch of his four pitches, and with amazing command of all four,” Bochy said. “He’ll throw them in any count. He’s got both sides covered, he’s got up and down covered. He just works quadrants as well as any pitcher I’ve seen.”
The Rangers, who still gave Eovaldi the $100,000 All-Star bonus that is in his contract, also have two-time National League Cy Young winner Jacob deGrom (10-4, 2.80) signed through at least 2027. After being Texas' only All-Star this year, deGrom has given up five runs in each of his last two starts.
This is Eovaldi's sixth MLB team, and his 34 wins for the Rangers are his most for any of them. He joined them after five years in Boston, and was part of World Series titles in his first season with both organizations. Eovaldi has a 101-84 career record, and is 9-1 with a 3.05 ERA in 17 postseason games.
“Well, I think he’s become this player long before Texas," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said after Eovaldi's gem against them Tuesday. “Great competitor, has great stuff, a really good arsenal and tremendous command. You got to earn everything against him.”
All-Star slugger Aaron Judge's return from a 10-game absence due to an elbow issue came against Eovaldi. Judge was 0 for 3 with two strikeouts as the Yankees had just one baserunner in Eovaldi's second-longest outing of the season — Anthony Volpe on a hustling double in the third.
“Just uses all his pitches,” Judge said. “Works all parts of the zone. Does a good job throwing strike-to-ball pitches. So you've really got to be disciplined when you're facing a guy like that.”
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
Texas Rangers starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi throws to the plate during the first inning of a baseball game against the Los Angeles Angels Wednesday, July 30, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Texas Rangers starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi, right, taps the glove of teammate catcher Jonah Heim after the third out during the fourth inning of a baseball game against the New York Yankees, Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
NUUK, Greenland (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump has turned the Arctic island of Greenland into a geopolitical hotspot with his demands to own it and suggestions that the U.S. could take it by force.
The island is a semiautonomous region of Denmark, and Denmark's foreign minister said Wednesday after a meeting at the White House that a “ fundamental disagreement ” remains with Trump over the island.
The crisis is dominating the lives of Greenlanders and "people are not sleeping, children are afraid, and it just fills everything these days. And we can’t really understand it,” Naaja Nathanielsen, a Greenlandic minister said at a meeting with lawmakers in Britain’s Parliament this week.
Here's a look at what Greenlanders have been saying:
Trump has dismissed Denmark’s defenses in Greenland, suggesting it’s “two dog sleds.”
By saying that, Trump is “undermining us as a people,” Mari Laursen told AP.
Laursen said she used to work on a fishing trawler but is now studying law. She approached AP to say she thought previous examples of cooperation between Greenlanders and Americans are “often overlooked when Trump talks about dog sleds.”
She said during World War II, Greenlandic hunters on their dog sleds worked in conjunction with the U.S. military to detect Nazi German forces on the island.
“The Arctic climate and environment is so different from maybe what they (Americans) are used to with the warships and helicopters and tanks. A dog sled is more efficient. It can go where no warship and helicopter can go,” Laursen said.
Trump has repeatedly claimed Russian and Chinese ships are swarming the seas around Greenland. Plenty of Greenlanders who spoke to AP dismissed that claim.
“I think he (Trump) should mind his own business,” said Lars Vintner, a heating engineer.
“What's he going to do with Greenland? He speaks of Russians and Chinese and everything in Greenlandic waters or in our country. We are only 57,000 people. The only Chinese I see is when I go to the fast food market. And every summer we go sailing and we go hunting and I never saw Russian or Chinese ships here in Greenland,” he said.
Down at Nuuk's small harbor, Gerth Josefsen spoke to AP as he attached small fish as bait to his lines. He said, “I don't see them (the ships)” and said he had only seen “a Russian fishing boat ten years ago.”
Maya Martinsen, 21, a shop worker, told AP she doesn't believe Trump wants Greenland to enhance America's security.
“I know it’s not national security. I think it’s for the oils and minerals that we have that are untouched,” she said, suggesting the Americans are treating her home like a “business trade.”
She said she thought it was good that American, Greenlandic and Danish officials met in the White House Wednesday and said she believes that “the Danish and Greenlandic people are mostly on the same side,” despite some Greenlanders wanting independence.
“It is nerve-wrecking, that the Americans aren’t changing their mind,” she said, adding that she welcomed the news that Denmark and its allies would be sending troops to Greenland because “it’s important that the people we work closest with, that they send support.”
Tuuta Mikaelsen, a 22-year-old student, told AP that she hopes the U.S. got the message from Danish and Greenlandic officials to “back off.”
She said she didn't want to join the United States because in Greenland “there are laws and stuff, and health insurance .. .we can go to the doctors and nurses ... we don’t have to pay anything,” she said adding "I don’t want the U.S. to take that away from us.”
In Greenland's parliament, Juno Berthelsen, MP for the Naleraq opposition party that campaigns for independence in the Greenlandic parliament told AP that he has done multiple media interviews every day for the last two weeks.
When asked by AP what he would say to Trump and Vice President JD Vance if he had the chance, Berthelsen said:
“I would tell them, of course, that — as we’ve seen — a lot of Republicans as well as Democrats are not in favor of having such an aggressive rhetoric and talk about military intervention, invasion. So we would tell them to move beyond that and continue this diplomatic dialogue and making sure that the Greenlandic people are the ones who are at the very center of this conversation.”
“It is our country,” he said. “Greenland belongs to the Greenlandic people.”
Kwiyeon Ha and Evgeniy Maloletka contributed to this report.
FILE - A woman pushes a stroller with her children in Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)
Military vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen of the Royal Danish Navy patrols near Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Juno Berthelsen, MP for the Naleraq opposition party that campaigns for independence in the Greenlandic parliament poses for photo at his office in Nuuk, Greenland, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Fisherman Gerth Josefsen prepares fishing lines at the harbour of Nuuk, Greenland, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A woman walks on a street past a Greenlandic national flag in Nuuk, Greenland, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
