When the Yankees acquired David Bednar from the Pittsburgh Pirates at last season’s Trade Deadline, he almost immediately stabilized the back end of the bullpen. After his first disastrous appearance with the team against the Marlins in early August, he allowed just 4 runs in 23 innings, striking out 33 and walking only 9, as “the Renegade” seized the closer’s role by the horns. Sure, the bullpen still wound up a block of Swiss cheese, but hey, it wasn’t his fault.
This year, though, the situation
is very much different. While it would be unfair to pin the entire bullpen’s struggles on Bednar, the closer certainly shoulders some of the blame. Heading into action last night, he had a 4.70 ERA (89 ERA+), having allowed 15 runs (12 earned) in 23 innings; his K% is a career-low 26.4 percent (ignoring his four-game cameo in 2020), while his walk rate has inched up to 9.4 percent after a career-best 7.6 percent last season. He’s allowed at least one run in 11 of his 23 appearances this season, and two or more hits in eight of them.
Bednar has been able to lock down his share of leads — his 12 saves are tied for sixth in baseball — but even when he’s kept the opposition off the board, he’s needed to put on his emotional support baserunners first before he locks in. Meanwhile, his meltdowns have been big and loud, and were a major contributor to the oft-cited “June Swoon, but make it May” that dogged the Yanks until this week in Kansas City.
So how concerned should we be? Is this simply a cold stretch by a reliever, or are we looking at another Devin Williams situation on our hands? Well…it’s complicated.
As can be seen here, Statcast is overall very much a fan of what Bednar has been doing. While I’m sure everybody involved would like to see that walk rate and that hard-hit rate down, a 97th-percentile ground-ball percentage is exactly what the Yankees are looking for out of their relievers; after all, you can’t take advantage of the Short Porch on a worm-burner to second. When we dive into Bednar’s individual offerings, however, we see where the problems begin to emerge.
Bednar is a three-pitch pitcher*, throwing a four-seamer, a curveball, and a splitter. Whereas he was once overwhelmingly fastball-dominant — from 2021 through 2024, he threw the four-seamer more than 54 percent of the time — he has settled into a much more even three-pitch mix over the past two years. This year, he still throws his fastball the most (39.4 percent), but his splitter is a close second at 34.2 percent and he throws his curveball a touch over a quarter of the time (26.4 percent).
*He technically threw one sinker in 2023 and one cutter in 2019, but I’m willing to bet those were fastballs that wound up moving a bit too much, so they can be safely ignored.
Last season, Bednar found success with all three pitches, with both his curveball and splitter serving as very effective out pitches, generating whiffs roughly 40 percent of the time and soft contact when they did manage to hit it. 2026 has been a very different story. Opposing hitters have crushed the fastball and the curveball, with batters hitting .419 with a .613 slugging percentage against the former, and .412 and .765 against the latter. And of course, one particularly awful Uncle Charlie got annihilated by Tyrone Taylor on May 17th, leading to a galling Subway Series loss at the hands of a cellar-dwelling Mets team. It was Bednar’s second blown save of the road trip.
Only Bednar’s splitter has maintained its effectiveness from last season, as hitters have batted just .130 and posted a .152 slugging percentage against it.
When it comes to the fastball, the Statcast data suggests that we shouldn’t be too concerned. The pitch has an xBA of .230 and an xSLG of .327: so long as his defense doesn’t continue to let him down—much like Clay Holmes in 2024, it feels that the infield forgets how to play defense when Bednar is pitching—we should see better results from his fastball.
On the other hand, Bednar has been having some trouble throwing the curveball with consistency. Despite the pitch having the lowest exit velocity against of the three (82.1 mph), it is the pitch that hitters have been able to square up most consistency, as he has surrendered seven hits, including both of his home runs, on curveballs like the one above to Taylor. Furthermore, the batted-ball data does not suggest regression to the mean should be expected, as the xBA and xSLG of .368 and .626 are better than the actual numbers mentioned above, but not all that much better.
In order for Bednar to be the dominant closer he was down the stretch last season, the Yankees will need to figure out what exactly has been wrong with his curveball. In the meantime, however, the solution is simple: focus on the splitter. Despite occasional bouts of wildness, Fernando Cruz has shown just how useful a fastball/splitter pitcher can be out of the bullpen, and it seems like Bednar and pitching coach Matt Blake may have been taking notes. Bednar has increasingly sidelined his curveball in favor of throwing his splitter more over the last few outings, to great success. Against the Rays on the 22nd, he threw just two curves, leaning on his splitter as he struck out three of the four Tampa Bay batters he faced.
This past Monday, meanwhile, Bednar abandoned the curveball entirely, using the fastball and splitter evenly against Kansas City in one of his most stress-free outings of the season.
Time will tell if this was just a small blip in the data, or if Bednar will truly be leaning more heavily on his splitter going forward. In either case, it’s something to keep an eye out going forward — and if it works, well, it’ll go a long way towards getting the bullpen back on track.
