The Yankees made headlines with an unusual roster construction in the Wild Card. Confident in their starting rotation and recognizing the team’s extreme lefty/right splits, New York carried a Major League record 16 position players, carrying just ten pitchers for the three-game setwith the Boston Red Sox. While the team did not, in the end, need that entire bench — only 14 players actually got in the games, with Giancarlo Stanton and Ali Sánchez riding the bench — the decision drew quite a bit of
attention: the NBC broadcast routinely stressed the wide variety of buttons that Aaron Boone had at his disposal, while Michael Baumann of FanGraphs published an article on Wednesday titled, “Everybody Except the Yankees Is Doing Wild Card Roster Construction Wrong.”
The historic move worked out pretty much perfectly. The Bombers sent out two very different lineups in each of the two games against Boston, with only five position players — designated hitter Ben Rice, left fielder Cody Bellinger, shortstop George Lombard Jr., outfielder Spencer Jones, and catcher Austin Wells — slotted into the lineup both nights; furthermore, in each game, the team went to the bench early and often: Luis García Jr. and Paul Goldschmidt pinch hit in the games they didn’t start, and Ryan McMahon, Trent Grisham, and José Caballero came in for defense. While these moves were not, obviously, the reason the Yankees won the series (holding the Boston lineup to just two runs on seven hits across 18 innings gets top billing), this flexibility off the bench was a weapon that Boston manager Chad Tracy had to contend with.
Despite its success, though, conventional wisdom dictates that the Yankees surrender this advantage against the Rays in the ALDS. They carried 12 pitchers last year, 11 in 2024, and 12 in 2022: fewer than the standard 13 they carry during the regular season, but nonetheless more than the 10 they carried this week. The thing is, though…how often do teams actually need more than 10 pitchers in the Divisional Series? Can the Bombers avoid the position player roster crunch — or rather, even more of one than they’re going to have when Aaron Judge returns from injury?
To see just how far the Yankees can realistically push the oversized bench in the ALDS, I went back to every Divisional Series from 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 (i.e., every year since the most recent CBA, when the Wild Card Game was expanded into the Wild Card Series) and counted how many pitchers each team actually used over the course of the series. I also documented how many different pitchers got the start, to see if that had any effect on the total (I did not record how many starting pitchers were used out of the bullpen, at least in this preliminary analysis).
Of these 32 teams, seven teams only used 10 pitchers, while one team — the 2022 Yankees, whose series went five games against Cleveland — used just nine. A full quarter of the time, teams were able to get away with the number of pitchers the Yankees had in the Wild Card Series, and while that’s much smaller than the 42 percent who used 12 or 13 pitchers, it suggests that entering the series with a skeleton bullpen is not exactly an impossible ask.
Since eight pitching staffs are a much more reasonable sample size, I then decided to take a deep dive into these staffs, looking into how many starting pitchers they used in relief.
The raw numbers don’t tell the whole story, of course — one of the five relievers on the 2022 Yankees was Clarke Schmidt, who did make a handful of starts that year between Triple-A and the Majors, and one on the 2024 Kansas City Royals was Kris Bubic, a starting pitcher who worked out of the bullpen while recovering from Tommy John surgery; both pitchers were capable of going multiple innings if needed. Even so, though, these numbers give some reasons both for and against the Yankees’ ability to carry just 10 pitchers.
The biggest reason not to carry a short bullpen is the fact that the Yankees are lined up to use four starters during the ALDS, with Cam Schlittler, Max Fried, Gerrit Cole, and Carlos Rodón likely to get the ball against Tampa Bay. Of these eight squads, only two were able to get by with 10 pitchers while using four starters — and in truth, only one had a “traditional” pitching staff, as the 2024 Detroit Tigers employed “pitching chaos” behind ace Tarik Skubal. In a five-game set, it’s already harder to keep the circle of trust completely closed without burning out the bullpen, and even more so when you’re only squeaking by with the bare minimum number of starting pitchers to begin with.
The Bombers, though, do have one trick up their sleeve: the number of starting pitchers and multi-inning relievers available out of the bullpen. Will Warren has already made his first postseason appearance of the season, coming on in relief of Fried on Wednesday night. Paul Blackburn has gone more than one inning in 32 of his 62 appearances. Long reliever Ryan Yarbrough and starter Ryan Weathers should be able to provide multiple innings, and it’s likely at least one (if not both) will make the roster. Brent Headrick, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to need much rest at all, having pitched in 81 games this season — a full half the season. And, if the rotation is lined up as I expect it will, with Schlittler getting Games 2 and 5, and Fried Game 3, either Cole or Rodón will get the ball in Game 4; given the amount of rest they’ve had, it wouldn’t surprise me to see whoever doesn’t get the Game 1 start come out of the bullpen in that game if the situation arises.
It might be theoretically possible, then, for the Yankees to get by with just 10 pitchers. In all likelihood, though, I doubt it’s going to be something they’re actually going to try: even with the extensive amount of rest built into the schedule (the Yankees have off-days scheduled between Games 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and 4 and 5, only playing on back-to-back days once — and at home), the fact that the team lines up best with four starters makes it unlikely we’ll see them risk rolling with just a six-man ‘pen. Even so, I’d expect Aaron Boone to keep the circle of trust small and keep only 11 pitchers; assuming Judge doesn’t return from the IL (I will personally be surprised if he returns before the ALCS), that would mean the Yankees would only need to drop one position player, and thus can employ the deep and flexible bench they used so well against Boston.
