The Yankees have upgraded their bullpen at the trade deadline by acquiring a trio of right-handed pitchers: David Bednar from the Pirates, Jake Bird from the Rockies, and Camilo Doval from the Giants. Bednar, a veteran closer who has made two All-Star games, is the main prize. Bird is a funky setup man with an unconventional arm slot whose unimpressive surface-level stats bely a far more effective pitcher. Doval is a risky bet due to his high walk rate, but features some of the nastiest stuff around.
We needn't get into the gory details of the Yankees’ relief woes over these last few months, but it has been a bottom-five unit in baseball by ERA and FanGraphs WAR since the start of June. Over that span the Yankees have had one of the worst records in baseball, tumbling out of first place in the AL East. Upgrades were necessary if the Bombers wanted to claw back ground in the divisional race with the Blue Jays and keep from falling behind the pack in a competitive Wild Card race.
The worry heading from Wednesday to Thursday was just how many assets they'd need to part with for the privilege. It was clear after Wednesday night that this year's deadline would be a seller's market for relief help—the Phillies parted with two of their top prospects to land Twins closer Jhoan Duran; the Mets traded a bushelful of talent to San Francisco and St. Louis for Tyler Rogers and Ryan Helsley. Then on Thursday morning the Padres had to forfeit top prospect Leo De Vries to pluck the electric Mason Miller (and starter J.P. Sears) from the A's.
With many of the top relief arms already claimed for high prices, the mission for Brian Cashman was to make substantive upgrades to his own bullpen without paying the kinds of eye-popping prices as many other contending teams. He was successful. The highest-ranked prospect the Yankees traded away overall was catcher Rafael Flores, ranked No. 8 by MLB Pipeline. The headliner for Bird was Roc Riggio, a small but toolsy middle infielder à la Caleb Durbin who was generally considered a top-30 prospect in the organization, but not much more than that. The Giants got more quantity for Doval than in other trades, but less quantity.
The same cannot be said for the Yankees’ bullpen haul. You can read more about Bednar from Nick Power's writeup here, but Bednar is a bat-missing firebrand who has rebounded from a disastrous 2024 season with a return to the All-Star form he first displayed the year before. His three pitches occupy all three lanes of the freeway: the high-90s fastball, the high-70s curveball, and a low-90s splitter in between. His 33.1 percent strikeout rate is absolutely elite, and his walk rate has normalized after a worrying spike last season. After blowing seven saves in 2024, Bednar is 17-for-17 in 2025.
Bird's numbers are the least impressive of the three, but in fairness having to brave the most hostile environment for pitchers while the team around you completely bottoms out probably wasn't helping. His 3.45 FIP and 3.59 xERA hint at much better performance than his 4.73 ERA suggests. Bird leans heavily on a pair of breaking balls: a sweeper and a curveball, both of which rack up whiffs at an extremely high rate.
Doval's career arc has some interesting parallels to Bednar's. Like Bednar, Doval made the All-Star Game in 2023 before bottoming out in 2024. Like Bednar, Doval has recovered with a much more representative effort this season. Like Bednar, he reached 100 career saves earlier this year. He's essentially a two-pitch pitcher with a high-velocity cutter and a wipeout slider. He gets plenty of strikeouts and keeps opposing hitters on the ground when they make contact, but his eye-watering 12.6 walk rate means Aaron Boone should probably keep the leash short when he enters in high-leverage spots.
According to Aaron Boone, Devin Williams will remain the Yankees’ closer, so these three arms will help form the path to the ninth inning...for now. Like Clay Holmes last year, Williams’ hold on the closer job is tenuous, and acquiring Bednar is a clear signal that they won't wait as long as they did last year to make a change if Williams falters again. At the moment, Bednar will probably slot in as the eighth-inning man. Doval has 15 saves and could close a game in a pinch. Bird provides a potential multi-inning option for Boone, having gotten six or more outs outs ten times. He'll probably feature more in the middle-innings, but still has late-inning stuff.
What makes this trio of moves such a success in my view is that none of these trades are rentals. Bednar has another year of team control after 2025; Doval has two and Bird has three. Keep in mind that Williams, Luke Weaver, and Jonathan Loáisiga are all impending free agents at season's end, so these trades give the Yankees more options with how they wish to proceed with their arm barn past 2025. When you factor in the quality of the relievers they got, the years of team control, and the lack of blue-chip prospects headed the other way, it's safe to say the Yankees did a bang-up job of reinforcing the bullpen.
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