PEORIA, Ariz. — It was a seemingly innocuous statement in the middle of another spring training gathering with reporters.
Padres manager Craig Stammen was asked about Nick Pivetta, and in the midst of praising what he did in 2025 said this about 2026:
“We’re just looking for that same consistency this year.”
Indeed, that is what the Padres got from Pivetta and need from him again.
He played a central role in the Padres winning 90 games last season.
They won 19 of his 31 starts. That included four in which Pivetta threw seven scoreless innings and another seven in which he went at least six innings while allowing one run.
Considering the team’s tenuous starting pitching depth, his performance could be even more crucial in 2026.
More than any other player on the roster, Pivetta makes it a point to assert he is just a cog that helps the Padres go.
But the consistency he finally found last season was to their great benefit. And his goal for this season is to be even more consistent.
“I mean it comes down to, you have, like five to seven ‘A’ games, 12 ‘B’ games and five to seven ‘C’ games,” Pivetta said of the typical starting pitcher’s season. “How can I make those ‘C’ games into ‘B-plus’, ‘A-minus’ games, essentially. It’s not a lack of focus, it’s not a lack of determination. It’s just more being human. And it’s part of baseball. Everybody, you can’t wake up and be the best. I mean, I guess you can, but even guys who are Cy Youngs have rough games as well. So it’s just limiting those rougher games.”
Pivetta has long possessed a fastball that moves about as much as any in the game and curveball that bends as sharply as any in the game and an intensity on the mound as feverish as any in the game.
In 2025, for the first time, he had an entire season of results that matched his attributes.
He set career bests and ranked among the top 10-20 pitchers in virtually every significant category — ERA (2.87), FIP (3.49), WAR (3.7), innings pitched (181⅔) and strikeouts (190).
With Joe Musgrove beginning the year on the injured list and with almost every other starter providing at least some reason to question what they will do this season, Pivetta duplicating that success seems paramount to the Padres’ success.
Heading into a year in which the team has a chance to do something it has never done by getting to the postseason a third straight season and he has a chance to break the bank by opting out of his contract afterward, Pivetta made it clear duplication is not the aim.
“There were other guys that were better than me last year,” he said. “And so what are the things that I need to do better to be those guys and compete like those guys?”
To be better, he wants to be better more often.
“When you play at a high level and you’re comparing yourself to Cy Young winners or guys who are higher than me on the Cy Young list, it’s very finite details it comes down to. So you want to make sure that you start off on the same foot, obviously, as you did last year. And that’s focusing on the bulk things, which are really important — getting ahead of guys, not walking guys, limiting damage. But then it comes down to, in those games when maybe you’re not doing as great, how can you go from (allowing) five runs to two runs?”
Explaining his success in 2025, he said late last season it was “years of experience, trial and error.”
There had been a lot of that.
Pivetta never had lower than a 4.04 ERA in any of his first eight major league seasons. He had a 4.82 ERA over 178 career starts.
Of all the pitchers to have thrown at least 1,000 innings over the past quarter century, Pivetta’s 4.76 overall ERA (which included 45 relief appearances) ranked 236th.
He had taken the ball a lot for the Red Sox in 4½ seasons, making 107 starts and 24 relief appearances.
Being durable is not nothing, but it is not elite.
Elite requires consistent excellence
Pivetta, who debuted with the Phillies in 2017, threw at least six scoreless innings while allowing no more than one hit six times from 2019 through ‘24. Only Dylan Cease and Blake Snell had more such starts in that span.
On the other side, Pivetta also allowed five or more runs in five or fewer innings in 17% (31) of his 178 career starts through ‘24. Just seven pitchers had more such starts in that span.
Peoria, AZ – February 23: Nick Pivetta #27 of the San Diego Padres looks on during a spring training game against the Milwaukee Brewers on February 23, 2026 in Peoria, AZ. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
For whatever other refinements and improvements Pivetta made in 2025, including an all-important move to the first-base side of the rubber that altered the angle at which his pitches approached the plate and helped him throw more strikes to varying locations, the biggest tangible change was that he limited damage.
Pivetta allowed five or more runs in five or fewer innings just twice last season. He allowed more than three runs in a game just five times and did so while lasting fewer than six innings just twice.
Without those five games, he would have had a 2.01 ERA.
That is usually a meaningless thing to assert — except in the context of it being what a pitcher is trying to eliminate.
“So it’s looking at those games and what I did in those games that I didn’t do so well, what adjustments I need to make,” Pivetta said. “I’d be lying to say I really took, like, a huge, deep dive. But it’s just like little adjustments. Maybe it was a hanging breaking ball or a certain type of pitch. It’s just changing those things. … I did the bulk of (limiting damage in 2025), but now it’s what are the small indicators that I can look out for as the season goes — and hopefully I will be pitching at as elite a level as I was last year, but in those moments, how can it be better?”