Luzardo showing his 'good stuff' with Marlins

ATLANTA -- Jesús Luzardo tied a career high with eight strikeouts in Thursday’s Marlins win over the Mets, and the key was a much-improved breaking ball.

Statcast identifies it as a curveball. PITCHf/x considers it a slider. Call it what you want, but it was Luzardo’s ace in the hole in one of his best starts to date and perhaps the key to the 23-year-old fulfilling his potential.

Luzardo earned six of his eight punchouts on the pitch, and all came swinging. He buried it in the dirt, brought it inside, and even painted it on the corner of the zone. He once again threw it more than any other pitch in his arsenal -- 33 of 97 pitches -- and looked the part of a recent top-10 prospect.

“It's a pitch that's come a long way,” Luzardo said. “I think I had it early in my career, a couple years back, but I kind of lost it at times last year and this year, and we've just been working on it a lot -- talking to [catcher] Sandy [León] here picking his brain a little bit and talking to other guys and then working with them on it. I think it's come a long way, and, hopefully, it keeps progressing.”

On the season, Luzardo has gotten opponents to whiff on 48.7 percent of swings on the pitch, and it was more of the same in his eighth start as a member of the Marlins. He coaxed 10 misses out of 20 swings, and six of the batted balls went foul. Only one of the balls in play went for a hit, though Javier Báez made it his 29th home run of the season.

That hit and a bases-loaded walk were Luzardo's lone mistakes of the night, as his ability to miss bats let him largely work out of any trouble. In total, he scattered two hits and four walks over 5 2/3 innings of two-run ball.

“We had a pretty good idea that the kid had good stuff,” manager Don Mattingly said. “The changeup was a good pitch, and the curveball or the slider -- whatever you want to call it -- can be a good pitch for him. It was a matter of getting him consistent with everything that he does and being able to get the ball in the strike zone when he needed to and to be able to be use his offspeed in counts, sometimes behind or even pitching backwards at time with certain guys.”

Mattingly said that he wants to keep things simple for Luzardo as he wraps up his first season in Miami after the Marlins acquired him at the Trade Deadline in a deal with with the A's that sent Starling Marte to Oakland. With more outings like Thursday, Mattingly wants to build up a steady workload for Luzardo, who bounced between the bullpen and rotation in Oakland.

“That trade really speaks to having this guy for a long time and a young pitcher that you feel that you can really develop along the lines of Sandy [Alcántara], Pablo [López], Trevor [Rogers],” Mattingly added. “Guys that you feel like, this guy can get better and better and better and really turn into a top of the rotation or be a really good piece in a rotation for you.”