The Yankees were off yesterday, but they’ve got a bit of a gauntlet coming up. After this upcoming series against the Mariners, four of their next five opponents will all come from the AL East, and the one team separating them are the AL West-leading Astros. A majority of that stretch is going to be facing the Blue Jays and Orioles, the two non-contending teams in the division to be fair, but a division foe is still likely going to relish attempting to get in the Yankees’ way all the same.
The team
has been doing its best to find offense, to mixed results. They’ve injected some fresh bats over the deadline and added a promising rookie, and they’ve also gotten better results from some of their more maligned bats in the lineup, but it has rarely all lined up on a given day yet as they’ve scored three runs or fewer in eight of their last 10 games. The rotation, however, has locked in during that same stretch to ensure that they’ve at least tread water, pitching phenomenally to give them a fighting chance in nearly every game. Their potential playoff rotation was on display in their most recent series, with Cam Schlittler, Gerrit Cole, and Max Fried all toeing the rubber against Atlanta and walking away with two wins in three tries. Carlos Rodón is still working his way back having just started his rehab assignment, but even without ever being at full strength the Yankee rotation has delivered from the get-go providing the team with an immense amount of quality innings.
The deadline didn’t change anything up on the Yankees’ end, but several of their rivals made moves to shake up their rotations. With that in mind, where do the Yankees rank now in terms of playoff rotations among the American League hopefuls?
Starting with their own options, the Yankees boast one of the deepest rotations in baseball, possibly the deepest. Schlittler has been a front-runner for the Cy Young Award all season, and his 2.21 ERA will match up brilliantly with any other team’s ace. Schlittler has the shortest postseason resume of any of the Yankees’ probable starters in a Wild Card Round or ALDS assignment, but he has the most memorable start in recent franchise history having dominated the Red Sox for eight shutout innings last year. Gerrit Cole has been rounding into form with a 3.35 ERA this year, and has pitched through six or more innings in five of his last six outings all of which were against formidable lineups. Max Fried is the most recent returnee from the IL having made four starts since, but outside of a letdown in his July 27th outing against the White Sox has looked incredibly sharp. His 2.88 ERA is no slouch, and both Fried and Cole are no strangers to big postseason starts having pitched on World Series teams in the past. Rodón is the only wild card at the moment, having looked rather rocky in his brief stint before returning to the IL with a rather gaudy 13.4 percent walk rate, but Ryan Weathers has done yeoman’s work as the fifth starter and Will Warren has held his own to present viable options should Rodón not put it together in time for a crucial start.
The Red Sox didn’t add to their arsenal of pitchers at the deadline (they actually traded away a young pitcher in Connolly Early for a bat), but they remain the biggest threat to a Yankee run in October with a sterling rotation of their own. Sonny Gray has annoyingly fit right in with Boston, pitching to a 2.78 ERA to go alongside their big free agent acquisition in Ranger Suarez and his staff-leading 3.2 fWAR. They could afford to deal Early away because Payton Tolle has been a hit for them this season, the 23-year-old pitching to a 3.20 ERA and 2.7 fWAR, and they’ve done all this without their ace Garrett Crochet who went on the IL in late April after just 30 highly ineffective innings, but he’s started throwing and has a shot of rejoining the team before the regular season ends. They’re dangerous, and if the Yankees were to line up against them it would be in a short series where any one pitcher blinking could be the difference between winning and losing.
Cleveland comes in as the next-highest rated rotation among contenders by fWAR, headed by the one-two punch of Parker Messick and Gavin Williams. Messick is having a breakout year after getting a handful of starts last season, pitching to a 2.57 ERA and shouldering a big workload with 136.2 innings already under his belt. Williams has collected even more, logging 144.2 innings to the tune of a 3.55 ERA with 185 strikeouts picked up in that span. Their rotation gets less worrisome from there though, with Joey Cantillo, Tanner Bibee, and Slade Cecconi getting the remaining work in the rotation to middling results.
The Rays slide in right under Cleveland, but they were active over the deadline to try and augment their odds. Drew Rasmussen and Shane McClanahan have been thriving pitching back in the Trop, with Nick Martinez entering as the surprise third member of their playoff trio. Tampa went out and added Freddy Peralta from the Mets at the deadline, hoping that his poor season reflected more on the Mets’ dysfunction than a personal one, but his debut as a Ray was one to forget as he got lit up in 3.2 innings.
Overall, the Yankees lucked out a bit in the pitching department. Two of the teams with the best rotations on their side of the bracket, the Tigers and Mariners, have been underachievers to the point where the former sold their ace at the deadline and the latter traded away a former ace that had broken down. Tarik Skubal becoming a Dodger might feel like complete overkill for the league, but for the Yankees’ hopes it was better than if he wound up a Ray and helping them maintain the division lead. They still face some significant challengers, but when the air gets chilly and the pitching matchup becomes all-important, New York can seemingly roll out a name to match anyone’s best on any given day. The unit is peaking right now, and they’ll need to stay hot long enough to carry this offense until reinforcements arrive, but there’s enough firepower here to potentially pitch their way through any challenger.
On the site today, Jonathan starts us off with a look at the pitching matchups that the Yankees can expect heading into this Mariners series. Then Sam has a double feature, first giving us the Rivalry Roundup where the Red Sox ran into a bizarre play that miraculously netted them a run before returning to talk about Melky Cabrera on the 2009 champion’s birthday. Michael gives us the rundown on the latest week down in the minors, Peter breaks down George Lombard Jr. in his At-Bat of the Week, and Jeff examines the Yankees’ best and worst ABS challengers as the season winds down.
Today’s Matchup:
New York Yankees vs. Seattle Mariners
Time: 7:05 p.m. EST
TV: YES Network, Mariners.TV, TBS
Venue: Yankee Stadium, Bronx, NY
