On Sunday afternoon, Marcus Stroman made his return after two and a half months on the IL, spinning five innings of one-run ball against the Athletics. In doing so, he lowered his season ERA to [checks notes] an 8.16 mark — a testament to how poorly he pitched at the start of 2025. Now, to point to a season ERA for Stroman is a somewhat misleading approach considering how little he’s been out there. At the same time, the knee inflammation that kept him on the sidelines for multiple months notwithstanding, the team showed little-to-no faith in him as a reliable starter in 2025.
While one can’t take too much away from Stroman’s rehab starts, the fact that he gave up eight earned runs in 10.1 IP across three rehab outings didn’t build a lot of confidence after his ugly April. Still, Stroman set all of that aside for an extremely positive first game back against the A’s at home. What can the Yankees draw from this?
First things first, always a sort of kitchen sink type of pitcher, Stroman reverted to a 2017 approach, the only year in which he threw the sinker more than half the time. Obviously, Stroman doesn’t have the same stuff he did back then, but whatever he had been doing recently wasn’t working either.
Relying heavily on the sinker, Stroman induced groundballs for 7 of his 15 outs in the game, something he needs to do because, even for his low average, the 34-year-old is getting fewer and fewer strikeouts. In what was by all accounts a very successful outing against the A’s, Stroman induced only one strikeout in five frames. It came against rookie Denzel Clarke, who as a hitter can best be described as an incredible defender.
Looking at the sole blemish on Stroman’s record in this game, it wasn’t even necessarily a bad pitch on his part — just one that Willie MacIver was ready for.
On a 3-2 count, Stroman dotted a sinker right on the inside part of the plate, and most of the time, a righty hitter can’t pull his hands in enough to hit that with authority. But it was exactly what MacIver accomplished. Interestingly enough, looking at Stroman’s pitch chart, he had thrown the exact same one to MacIver for a called strike opening the previous at-bat against him in the third.
Using a lot of sinkers, and not necessarily pounding the zone with a below league-average zone rate on the pitch, Stroman relied on the A’s willingness to swing out of the zone quite frequently. This was done not necessarily for whiffability, but more so in search of weak contact.
Moving forward, that’s a rather easy potential problem to point to, considering the 35-percent O-Swing rate on Stroman’s sinker against the A’s was over both his career numbers (23.2 percent in 2024) and the MLB average (27 percent on the dot).
Furthermore, even in this affair, it is not as if Stroman did an outstanding job at limiting hard contact. Pitching deeper into the game, Stroman allowed the same number of hard-hit balls (7) as the opposing team’s starter, Luis Severino, who allowed seven runs.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, one is more likely to chalk this performance up to more of an outlier than a sign of true changes to come. Despite the A’s tallying seven runs on Saturday, they remain a decidedly middling offense with only a few real threats in the lineup. Still, as long as Stroman utilizes that sinker to keep the ball on the ground, he has a fighting chance, and the Yankees don’t need a lot more than that from him in the short term. Fifth starters don’t have to be aces; if they’re delivering five innings of one-run ball or something in that range, then that is acceptable.
The stakes will be a bit higher next time Stroman takes the mound as he’ll likely be facing the Mets to open up a weekend Sunway Series set at Citi Field on Friday. The likes of Francisco Lindor and Juan Soto will provide a more challenging test.