Eric Reyzelman was glad to be back in Triple-A.
After spending all of last season with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, the right-handed reliever and No. 28 prospect in the Yankees organization opened this season in Double-A Somerset. He was promoted May 19th.
“I loved being in Double-A. We have a great staff, great team, love the facilities and the people over there,” Reyzelman said. “It was really good for me to go back there and get some confidence and get back to how I feel I should be pitching.
“But obviously, really good to be here. Definitely wanted to be back here and pitch well and put myself in a good spot to move through.”
Unfortunately, his return was curtailed by a trip to the injured list.
In Reyzelman’s first three outings, he allowed one run and four hits with three walks and four strikeouts in 4.1 innings. Then at Syracuse on June 3rd, he gave up four runs and three hits in two-thirds of an inning with four walks and one strikeout. He was put on the seven-day IL on June 5th.
Injuries were the primary culprit for Reyzelman’s struggles last season. He appeared in 34 games with the RailRiders and was 1-2 with a 4.29 ERA, 42 walks, and 45 strikeouts in 42 innings. He was experiencing back pain, but didn’t say a word. Being so close to The Show, he was afraid to tell the Yankees anything.
Part of the reason he didn’t say anything was due to the season he had in 2024. He went a combined 1-1 with a 1.16 ERA, 63 strikeouts, and 5-for-5 in save opportunities in 31 games across three levels: Rookie ball, High-A, and Double-A. He got an invite to big-league spring training in 2025 as a result.
“To know I was a call away, I just really, really wanted to push through,” he said. “It turned out to not be the right decision. But all of that is a learning process and experience and something that I now know how to deal with.”
Reyzelman said it was like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. He would do all these short-term fixes, but all he was doing was making things worse.
Finally, after a rough outing on August 3rd against Nashville – three runs, one hit, three walks, two strikeouts in two innings – he couldn’t take the pain anymore and spoke up.
“I realized if I did go up, if there was a circumstance, a situation, if I had a couple good outings in a row, when I did get called up to the big leagues, I wouldn’t be able to bring my best self,” Reyzelman said. “I didn’t want to go up there and not pitch the way I know I can pitch. I know how tough it is, I know what the business is like. You go up there and don’t throw the ball well, it makes it a lot harder to get back up. Unfortunately, that’s how it goes sometimes. You need to be ready and the truth is I just wasn’t physically, mentally, all the stress of dealing with that. Where I was, the headspace I was in, wasn’t going to translate to good pitching performances.”
When rest and rehab didn’t work, Reyzelman had back surgery in the offseason. He also did a lot of work with Aaron Barnett in the Yankees’ mental conditioning department.
Having surgery meant Reyzelman wasn’t able to go to big-league camp this year nor able to pitch alongside fellow Triple-A arm Harrison Cohen for Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic. Then, his first outing in minor-league spring training wasn’t great.
“I went in there thinking, ‘I’m going to throw the best I’ve ever thrown,’” Reyzelman said. “That first outing it was like my body forgot what to do. I think I walked three or four in a row, gave up a couple hard hits in the zone and my velo was 91, 93. I just had to take a step back. Last year, after all those outings, I’d be so shortsighted that I’d lose sight of why I wasn’t pitching well, which was my back. I tried to make all these changes on the fly and reinvent the wheel every outing. I kind of defaulted back to that for a second and was like, ‘Oh, no. It didn’t work.’
“But we just have the best people in the business. John Kremer, our rehab coordinator, sat me down and was like, ‘Dude, it is your first time on the bump in who knows how long. You just had major surgery. Everything we’ve been doing is 100 percent right. We have a great process, you have the best routine you’ve ever had. Continue to hammer it and the results will come.’ As much as I didn’t want to listen to him, I did. It was the best advice I’ve taken. I did not change a thing in my routine since that day and progressively every outing just got better and better and better.”
It showed at Somerset. In 13 games, he was 1-1 with a 3.12 ERA, 32 strikeouts and just four walks in 17.1 innings to earn the promotion to Triple-A.
Now, it’s wait-and-see for how long Reyzelman is on the injured list before returning to the RailRiders.
