The Noah Schultz who threw four innings every Saturday for Birmingham two years ago, maximized every scheduled start by spending the minimal amount of time on the field. He pumped strikes and didn't shy away from contact, especially the contact that came back to him. Give him a normal amount of luck, and he could get in and out of an inning on 10 pitches, more or less.
The Schultz who tried to adopt a normal starter's workload every five days in 2025 labored, to put it simply. The stuff backed up, the command wavered, and every attempt to troubleshoot couldn't keep righties from hammering him.
When Schultz hit the injured list with patellar tendinitis in early July, it almost came as good news, in the way that it's a relief when the mechanic finally figured out what's making that awful noise under the hood. It just goes only so far, because there's the cost that's required to fix it, and the lack of a guarantee that it won't happen again.
Schultz paid a price for the setback, as he came up 15 innings short of his previous season's workload. His prospect stock also took a hit, because strike-throwing from preposterously long levers was his calling card, and he'd surrendered some control without gaining whiffs in return. He'd been successful recently enough -- including stretches of 2025 -- that giving up on him would've been an overreaction, but he entered the new season having to reestablish his bona fides.
Two starts in, he appears hell-bent on making every day look like a Saturday.
After throwing four scoreless, hitless innings against Durham in his debut on Thursday, Schultz threw five innings of one-run ball in Charlotte's 9-3 victory over the Sounds here in Nashville Wednesday night. The hallmarks of 2024 were back. He needed only 57 pitches to complete five innings, and the only walk he issued was a four-pitch burp amid a barrage of strikes. What's more, he overcame that free pass by starting a 1-5-3 double play that ended the only thing that approximated a jam.
But while the results look familiar, the pitch mix is a departure. While he used to rely nearly exclusively on a sinker setting up a couple different slider shapes, it appears that he's figured out a cutter that doesn't diminish his bread-and-butter. Statcast says he threw it nearly as often (14 times) as his sinker (15 times), and it gained steam as he approached the finish line.
Schultz's sinker velocity stayed at 96 for the entirety of his start, but his cutter started in the high-80s, and ended in the low-90s. While the highlight reel shows the five punchouts, the most impressive pitch was this 93 mph cutter to Luke Adams that preceded the double play.
Schultz then he followed it up with a changeup -- another pitch he didn't throw in 2024 -- that Adams took just below the zone, but it still managed to set up an elevated cutter that Adams chopped into the ground for the final two outs on Schultz's watch.
If there's any reason to dampen enthusiasm, he allowed a homer to Luis Lara on a not-terrible fastball, but one that might show why the cutter was necessary to reduce its vulnerability.
But nobody was on base for it, and the Sounds couldn't do any more damage, so all it did was raise Schultz's ERA from 0.00 to 1.00. He's now thrown a complete game's worth of innings through his two starts, and Lara's swing is the only thing preventing a Maddux: 9 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 10 K on just 97 pitches.
Charlotte 9, Nashville 3
- Sam Antonacci went 2-for-5 with a HBP, and was picked off trying to get a huge jump off second base.
- William Bergolla Jr. was 3-for-4 with a sac bunt.
- Tanner Murray singled, walked twice and struck out twice.
- Jacob Gonzalez was 0-for-4 with a walk and was caught stealing.
- Noah Schultz: 5 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 5 K, 1 HR, 41 of 57 pitches for strikes.
