BOSTON _ There are plenty of days in the Boston Red Sox's weight room when Nathan Eovaldi is the last man standing.
Even in this postseason, while pitching in the most high-stakes baseball games of his life, his routine hasn't changed.
"He's like warming up with 300 pounds on the squat rack," Rick Porcello said recently. "I can't even think about that this time of year."
Exerting himself in the weight room has helped Eovaldi, a right-hander, overcome a laundry list of injuries to become among the most dominant pitchers of the 2018 playoffs.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that drafted him in 2008 and traded him to the Miami Marlins for Hanley Ramirez four years later, has faced his triple-digit fastball with no success in the first two games of the World Series.
And there's no relief for his former team in sight. Red Sox manager Alex Cora has tentatively named Eovaldi his starting pitcher for Game 4 at Dodger Stadium on Saturday. However, that plan could change if there's another opportunity for Eovaldi to be Boston's setup man for a third straight game on Friday.
"If we have a chance to be up 3-0 with him on the mound and Craig (Kimbrel), we'll do it," Cora said.
The confidence the Red Sox have in him is testament to Eovaldi's character. A former Dodgers executive described Eovaldi, an 11th-round pick, as perhaps the most humble person _ and most dogged competitor _ of any draft selection he made for Los Angeles.
"He's just a terrific human being," said Logan White, who spent 13 years as a scouting director for the Dodgers before joining the San Diego Padres' front office in 2014. "He's very humble, unassuming. ... But he didn't doubt his ability to pitch in the big leagues from the time he signed."
Eovaldi plowed through rehabbing from a second elbow ligament replacement surgery _ his first was as a high school junior in 2007 _ and came away resembling the pitcher White and the Dodgers believed he could be before his career took him from the Marlins to the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays before the Red Sox.
In his first postseason, Eovaldi has compiled a 1.65 earned-run average over 16 1/3 innings. As a starter in the first two rounds of the playoffs, he held former Yankees teammates to five hits and one run over seven innings in a Game 3 American League Division Series victory and limited the Houston Astros to two runs on six hits and two walks over six innings in a victory in Game 3 of the AL Championship Series.
Eovaldi's last three outings have been out of the Red Sox bullpen, where Cora also has aggressively deployed fellow starters Chris Sale and Rick Porcello in relief to maximize matchups.
By the end of Wednesday's perfect eighth inning against the Dodgers, Eovaldi had retired 10 of the last 11 batters he faced. He shut down the Dodgers in the eighth inning of a World Series game on consecutive nights, without a day of rest for the first time in his career.
"I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow, but I think I'll recover," Eovaldi said afterward. "Whatever role they need me in, like I've been saying, I'm ready to take the ball any time."
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