Nolan Arenado changed course in Philadelphia, and the results followed almost immediately. After a miserable start to the season, the 35-year-old third baseman committed to a new pregame hitting routine in April and has been one of Arizona’s steadiest bats since.
The turnaround mattered because the slump had been real. Arenado, who joined the Diamondbacks in 2026 after an offseason move from the Cardinals, was hitting.167/.184/.188 after the April 11 game in Philadelphia. The night after that game, Torey Lovullo used a pinch hitter for him. From April 12 through Sunday, Arenado hit.329/.402/.592, a sharp change for a player whose 2025 season in St. Louis ended with a.666 OPS, the lowest of his career.
Arenado said the stretch forced him to confront what was not working. He said it was hard because he did not want to arrive at his new team that way. Then he met with Arizona’s hitting coaches, and together they agreed he needed to change the way he prepared before games. The new path was simple in one sense and difficult in another: a different routine, built to get him ready to hit again.
The idea was not entirely new to him. Arenado said Albert Pujols had told him during the 2025 season that he would have to make a drastic change at some point because his routine was not working. Arenado played with Pujols in 2022, and he remembered the veteran’s own approach later in his career, when Pujols used high-speed machine work with difficult angles as part of his pregame routine. Pujols, Arenado said, described that adjustment bluntly: this was the only way he could prepare.
Arenado took that lesson into Philadelphia and fully committed to the new routine there. He said that if Pujols, known as La Máquina, had to do it, he did too. The change was not cosmetic. It was the kind of adjustment that asks a player to admit the old answer has stopped working, even when the clock is still early in the season and the uniform is still new.
Lovullo has seen the difference in the swing itself. He said Arenado has been consistent with the plane of his swing since mid-April and has done a better job recognizing balls and strikes. That matters as much as the numbers, because it suggests the change was not just a short burst of timing but a more stable correction.
The broader context makes the rebound stand out. Arenado arrived in 2026 after an offseason move from St. Louis, where the 2025 OPS of.666 marked a career low. For a player with 13 years in the majors, a slow start could have looked like the beginning of a decline. Instead, at least for now, it looks like a reminder that even established hitters sometimes need to rebuild the routine before they can rebuild the results.
What comes next is whether the new rhythm holds once pitchers adjust again. For Arenado, the test is no longer whether he can change. He already has.
