It took until the New Year, but we finally have our first real smoke emanating from the previously dormant Yankees hot stove.
On Sunday, multiple outlets reported that the Yankees and Marlins were engaged in serious talks surrounding starting pitcher Edward Cabrera. It’s far from the first time that the Yankees have had rumored interest in one of the Marlins’ starters but it is the first time we’ve seen reporting on legitimate discussions involving Cabrera. Let’s take a look at why the Yankees find him so intriguing.
2025 Statistics: 26 games started, 137.2 IP, 8-7, 3.53 ERA (125 ERA+), 3.83 FIP, 3.62 xFIP, 25.8% K%, 8.3% BB%, 1.23 WHIP, 2.0 fWAR
2026 FanGraphs Depths Charts Projections: 26 games started, 142 IP, 8-9, 4.03 ERA, 3.91 FIP, 24.7% K%, 9.5% BB%, 1.31 WHIP, 2.0 fWAR
Contract Status: Projected to earn $3.7 million in second of four years of arbitration eligibility. Free agent following the 2028 season.
The Marlins signed Cabrera as an international free agent out of the Dominican Republic in 2015 and handed him his MLB debut in August of 2021. He gained moderate national prominence after being featured in social media clips highlighting his triple-digits fastball and a unicorn changeup that he has thrown as hard as 98 mph. His name alongside several rotation-mates tends to pop up every winter and trade deadline in recent years given his high upside, team control, and the Marlins’ overabundance of controllable, young MLB-ready pitching.
The question was always whether Cabrera could stay healthy enough to reach his lofty ceiling. He missed the second half of 2023 after suffering a right shoulder impingement and the first half of the following season while recovering from the same injury, has dealt with blister issues that have cost a start here and there throughout his career, and missed the final month of 2025 to an elbow sprain.
Despite that latest injury, 2025 was still a breakout year for 27-year-old, pitching a career-high 26 starts and 137.2 innings after failing to exceed 20 starts or hit 100 innings in any of his previous four seasons. He led all Marlins pitchers with 150 strikeouts and showed glimpses of ace-caliber potential. He pitched 5.2 scoreless allowing three hits and striking out ten against the Angels on May 25th, allowed one run on two hits with 11 strikeouts across eight innings against the Braves on August 8th, and pitched seven shutout innings of one-hit ball with ten strikeouts against Atlanta again 17 days later.
Cabrera profiles similarly to Luis Gil — two hard-throwing righties who are held back from reaching their ceiling by wayward command. That being said, Cabrera took impressive strides in the command department in 2025 whereas Gil took a worrying step back. Cabrera just finished with the lowest walk rate of his career (8.3-percent) after posting MLB’s worst walk rate (13.3-percent) among pitchers with at least 290 innings between 2021 and 2024. For reference, Gil’s 12.7-percent walk rate is third worst in baseball among pitchers with at least 240 innings since the start of 2021. Cabrera also finished with the highest in-zone rate (50.7-percent) of his career and posted his first season with above-average command as measured by Eno Sarris’ Location+ metric (101 in 2025)
Cabrera’s thunderous fastball and demon changeup are what immediately catch your attention, but it’s actually his other secondaires that make him such an intriguing pitcher. Both his curveball and slider return whiff rates above 43-percent, and it’s those two pitches that helped him finish just about inside the top quartile in strikeout, whiff, chase, and groundball rates among qualified pitchers in 2025.
Despite their elite velocity, poor shape on both Cabrera’s fastballs paired with poor command in the zone leads to the pair of pitches getting pummeled for a combined expected slugging in excess of .600 in 2025. I think an adjustment to the deployment of his arsenal could be the key to unlocking his untapped potential. He should scrap the four-seamer entirely and focus on commanding the sinker more toward the bottom of the zone. He already deploys the changeup and curveball as his two most-used pitches, so perhaps exchanging out those scrapped four-seamers for an uptick in slider usage could pay dividends. He can use the sinker and changeup as in-zone weapons to induce whiffs and ground balls while focusing on the pair of breakers as his go-to put-away pitches.
One area where he already meshes nicely with the Yankees’ current pitching philosophy is his ability to induce horizontal movement across his repertoire, both his sinker and curveball comfortably within the top-25 league-wide of their respective pitch types in terms of horizontal movement relative to average. Pitching coach Matt Blake has excelled at adding horizontal movement to his pitchers’ offerings — think Max Fried’s cutter and Michael King and Will Warren’s sweepers — and I imagine he would be eager to get his hands on Cabrera.
Cabrera and Alcantara are the two most popular names when it comes to trade rumors involving Marlins pitchers, and Cabrera is undoubtedly the more expensive to acquire. Though he doesn’t have the same proven pedigree as Sandy’s unanimous 2022 NL Cy Young win, his age and two extra years of team control are what allow Miami to ask for multiple high ceiling prospects. Garrett Crochet’s trade from the White Sox to the Red Sox is the most applicable recent example, Chicago scoring a pair of consensus top-100 prospects as part of the package from Boston. The injury histories and team control for Cabrera and Crochett were comparable, though Crochet was coming off a far better season the winter he was traded. Therefore, it makes sense that we have seen several proposals float around social media that include one of New York’s upper-level pitching prospects alongside the names of several players lower down on the farm who experienced breakouts in 2025.
With Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, and Clarke Schmidt all expected to miss the start of the season while recovering from their respective elbow surgeries it’s no wonder that Brian Cashman admitted at the Winter Meetings that he would “love” to add another starter. If rumors are to be believed and the Yankees are able to avoid including one of their blue-chip prospects including George Lombard Jr., Spencer Jones and Elmer Rodriguez, this becomes a lower-risk, high-upside move both for this year and for the future. Cabrera would allow them to use Ryan Yarbrough in long relief or provide insurance should one of their young starters — Cam Schlittler, Warren, or Gil — struggle out of the gate. He also has the ceiling to remain in the rotation once Cole and Rodón return. There’s significant smoke to this rumor, so stay tuned.
