As the Trade Deadline approaches, Yankees fans have a pretty good idea that the team will be looking to add some bullpen help at the deadline. I can, of course, cite reasons why they should — thanks in large part to Camilo Doval, Jake Bird, and (regrettably) Tim Hill, the team has a combined 15 blown saves (tied for 10th in the league), a pedestrian 22.3 strikeout percentage, and their 82 shutdowns—defined by FanGraphs as “when a reliever accumulates greater than or equal to 0.06 WPA in any individual
game”—ranks definitively in the bottom half of the league.
Let’s be honest, though: it doesn’t really matter what the state of the bullpen is: a three-headed monster of Chad Green, Dellin Betances, and Aroldis Chapman didn’t stop Brian Cashman from acquiring Zack Britton in 2018, after all. In fact, in the last 10 years, the Yankees have added a whopping 16 relievers at the Trade Deadline: Tyler Clippard, Adam Warren, David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, Britton, Lance Lynn (he was supposed to join the bullpen, before the plug was pulled on the Sonny Gray experience), Joely Rodríguez, Clay Holmes, Lou Trivino, Scott Effross, Keynan Middleton, Mark Leiter Jr., Enyel De Los Santos, David Bednar, Bird, and Doval; only in 2019 and the COVID-shortened 2020 did they fail to add one.
In that same stretch, the Yankees have also made a habit of poaching players from the Colorado Rockies, acquiring, to varying levels of success, DJ LeMahieu, Adam Ottavino, Mike Tauchman, Ryan McMahon, Angel Chivilli, and Jake Bird. Might the Bombers go to that well once more, this time for pitcher Antonio Senzatela?
2026 Statistics (Thus Far): 30 games, 49.0 IP, 9-2 W-L, 3 saves, 3.31 ERA (151 ERA+), 3.22 FIP, 4.12 xFIP, 20.8% K%, 7.9% BB%, 1.224 WHIP, 1.1 fWAR, 1.4 rWAR
2026 ZiPS Rest-of-Season Statistics: 12 games (5 games started), 38.0 IP, 2-4 W-L, 5.17 ERA, 4.69 FIP, 14.6% K%, 7.8% BB%, 0.3 fWAR
Signed as an international amateur free agent out of Venezuela, Senzatela made his MLB debut on April 6, 2017, having cracked the Opening Day roster out of spring training. His career to date has been quite a rollercoaster. Senzatela spent most of his rookie season in the starting rotation, being moved to the bullpen down the stretch in order to limit his innings, as he had missed a chunk of the 2016 minor-league season due to injuries. Further such woes and minor-league stints limited him to just 23 games (13 starts) in 2018, while the juiced ball year hit him hard, as he posted an absurd 6.71 ERA — somehow only a 77 ERA+, a sign of how inflated run totals were in that season. Following a strong 2020 and a solid 2021, the Rockies handed him a five-year extension worth $50.5 million. It turned sour in a hurry: a torn ACL ended his season in August 2022, and after just two starts in 2023, he sprained his UCL and, that July, underwent Tommy John surgery. Senzatela returned to the mound for a brief cameo in 2024, making just three starts at the end of the season.
Finally healthy for the first time in years, Senzatela opened the 2025 season in the Rockies rotation … and proceeded to be one of the worst pitchers in the league: his 6.65 ERA was the highest among pitchers with at least 130 innings, and his -0.1 fWAR topped only Jake Irvin and Erick Fedde in the same category. At the end of August, they were finally forced to send him out to the bullpen, where he finished the season strong, posting a 2.86 ERA in 22 innings across seven appearances.
Now, in the bullpen full-time for the first time in his career, Senzatela has excelled. Among the 165 relievers with at least 30 innings, his 1.1 fWAR ranks 14th, and his 2.39 road ERA would rank 35th (his 3.31 ERA is partially the result of a Coors-inflated 4.37 home ERA). He has cut down his arsenal, notably dropping the slider — the breaking ball he threw most often in 2025 — almost completely, deploying it just 21 times this season. Senzatela has also reduced his reliance on the four-seam fastball, throwing it just 38.7 percent of the time, down from 56.9.
To compensate, the two pitches Senzatela threw the least last season, the cutter and the sinker, have become his second- and third-most common pitch, respectively, with the cutter getting significantly more use (29.9 to 11.4 percent). This gives him—much like Cam Schlittler—a three-fastball arsenal to work with, all of which come out of almost identical arm angles: the fastball and sinker at 41 degrees, the cutter at 39.
Senzatela does use his heater very differently than the hard-throwing Yankees ace, though. His four-seamer and cutter are both designed to generate whiffs, especially against righties, albeit in different ways: the four-seamer is thrown up in the zone at high velocity (97 mph), while the cutter averages just under 92 mph and operates more as a fast slider. His sinker, meanwhile, is thrown at a velocity closer to the fastball (96 mph), but is designed to generate soft contact, as it generates whiffs just 2.4 percent of the time and has yet to record a strikeout this season, but boasts an average “launch” angle of -7 degrees. Occasionally, Senzatela tosses in a curveball, mostly against lefties, which has generated whiffs at a very high rate. Almost half of the 11 plate appearances in which he has thrown a curveball this season has ended with a strikeout on said curveball.
That being said, when you look under the hood, there are some areas of concern:
Despite having an above-average xERA, Senzatela doesn’t do anything particularly well besides fastball velocity, although he doesn’t do anything particularly poorly, either. He doesn’t overwhelm you with strikeouts, gets a decent amount of groundballs on the sinker, walks his fair share of batters (but not an overwhelmingly large amount), and gives up some hard contact. Very little of this, however, is barreled.
Similar to Tim Hill, a few meltdowns which have inflated his ERA (in particular, four-run appearances on June 5th and June 29th raised his June ERA to 8.18). Unlike Hill, however, he hasn’t consistently put together shutdown outings between. In fact, after five scoreless outings to start the season, Senzatela has strung together three-straight scoreless outings just once, and two in a row just three times.
In many ways, Senzatela is outperforming the sum of his parts, which makes him simultaneously a prime candidate to be traded—it seems extraordinarily unlikely the Rockies would want to exercise his 2027 player option, but while the front office has changed, it’s the same Rockies ownership, so you never quite know—and the type of player the Yankees probably should avoid. While circumstances will likely mean that he will cost less in prospect capital than someone with a more reliable track record like Luke Weaver or Adrian Morejon, the Yankees already have quite the stable of inconsistent and unreliable arms.
Senzatela probably makes more sense for a team like the Nationals, a team whose offense has been so prolific they have kept a bullpen completely lacking any competent arms in the race, than for the Yankees, who are looking to lower Aaron Boone’s blood pressure, not increase it.
