Jesús Luzardo, it’s been well-documented (including here by The Athletic), was confident he was tipping his pitches when he allowed a historic 20 runs across his previous two outings before facing the Cubs on Wednesday. He made some changes to correct it.

There was something else that stood out in his six-inning, one-run bounce-back outing against the National League’s best run-scoring offense: Luzardo flashed things back to 2023.

NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Taryn Hatcher reported on the broadcast before the second inning that pitching coach Caleb Cotham wanted to simplify things for Luzardo ahead of Wednesday’s outing — “subtracting” rather than “adding” — and return to the things that Luzardo thrived on in his first 11 outings of the season, when he pitched to a 2.15 ERA.

In practice, Luzardo turned back the clock even more than that. It had a lot to do with his pitch mix.

Of the 99 pitches Luzardo threw on Wednesday, 46 of them were four-seam fastballs. For the first time all season, Luzardo — at least according to Baseball Savant’s pitch-tracking data — did not throw a single sinker.

Other than his last outing before being shelved for the remainder of the 2024 season, Luzardo hadn’t since 2023 gone a game without throwing a sinker. He has eclipsed Wednesday’s 46.5% four-seam rate just once since the start of last season. He did it eight times in 2023.

Was it a temporary reset, or a sign of things to come?

Luzardo’s 2023 season — his best full one to date — was built largely on the strength of his four-seam fastball. He threw it almost five times as often as his sinker. Opponents slashed .225/.264/.386 against it. By average and slugging, it was his most effective pitch, and it vastly outperformed his sinker (.300/.320/.529). Luzardo wasn’t healthy in 2024, but the fastballs followed a similar trend, to an even greater degree.

Things have evened out in his first season as a Phillie. Luzardo has allowed a .324 average and .491 slugging against his four-seam fastball; those numbers against the sinker are .344 and .500.

His previous two outings — a 12-run explosion against the Brewers and an eight-run blow-up in Toronto — saw Luzardo throw his sinker at the fourth- and fifth-highest rates, respectively, of the season, and the four-seam rates were correspondingly low (fifth- and second-lowest, respectively). The rate at which each fastball type resulted in a hit was almost exactly the same as the rate at which Luzardo threw each one.

So, the upshot is this: Luzardo’s much-needed outing on Wednesday came as he emulated not just the pitcher he was in the first two months of the season, but the pitcher he was in his best season as a big-leaguer. He relied on the pitch that led him to that career-best year, and he did it against one of the best offenses in baseball.

Whether the Phillies derive anything from that is worth watching. The only time this season Luzardo had a four-seamer to sinker split as drastic as he did on Wednesday was against the Rockies, which skews any possible conclusion you might want to draw from that six-inning, two-hit, 10-strikeout performance. There’s an argument that while Luzardo’s best season came two years ago, his best two-month stretch came at the start of this season, which makes it tough to completely deviate from the arsenal Luzardo deployed in that span — namely, a closer balance between four-seamers and sinkers.

But the night-and-day nature of Luzardo’s last outing, compared to his prior two, is also hard to ignore: four-seamers up, sinkers zero, whiffs up, hard contact down. Maybe there’s something there.

Or maybe it was all just pitch-tipping.