The Yankees entered Saturday’s action against the Athletics with a 22-16 record and a three-game lead in the underperforming AL East. What most fans would agree is the top reason for their first-place start is the team’s offense, which paces the majors in home runs and wRC+, thanks to the usual Aaron Judge dominance, breakout starts from Ben Rice and Trent Grisham, and solid lineup depth.
What fans would give less credit to is the pitching staff. 17 of their first 38 starts for the Yankees have gone to an underperforming trio of Marcus Stroman, Carlos Carrasco, and Will Warren. Devin Williams, the star closer acquisition in the offseason, has been a trainwreck for the most part. They have the most blown leads in the seventh or later in baseball.
And yet, they have the ninth-best ERA and FIP in baseball. Their rotation, which has been much-maligned due to the injuries that forced several depth arms to step up, still ranks 10th and 15th respectively in those categories. When you look deeper, it actually makes a lot of sense.
Baseball Reference
They’ve done extremely well to almost every spot in the lineup, holding the five and six-hole hitters to ghastly slash lines while holding all but three lineup spots to under a .700 OPS, and even those are reasonable, with the three and four-hole bats both still batting .230 or lower.
There’s just one small issue. Nine-hitters are slashing an unfathomable .305/.363/.441. The spot in the lineup where the worst hitters in baseball are placed is crushing a team that is holding opposing hitters to an overall triple slash of .206/.291/.328. What’s going on?
First, we need to compare it to the rest of the league. The league average nine-hitter is slashing .243/.306/.350. The Yankees are allowing a decent amount more slug (.136 ISO vs .107), but the 58-point increase in OBP is absolutely eye-popping.
Fortunately, the Yankees aren’t totally alone in this. The Phillies are somehow allowing a .896 OPS to nine-hitters. The Yankees rank have the fifth-highest OPS allowed, but they’re one of only 11 teams to allow an OPS over .700, at a jarring .804.
Baseball Reference
The thing I want to look at is that tOPS+ column. It basically says how these nine-hitters are performing relative to the Yankees’ overall stats. The Yankees have the highest mark with a 159 tOPS+ in this split, meaning that nine-hitters have hit 59 percent better against the Yankees relative to the team’s baseline.
First, I wanted to check if it was luck. After a look at Savant Search, the Yankees are still allowing the fourth-highest xwOBA to nine-hitters. Not great.
Baseball Savant
Diving into the pitcher-by-pitcher level, guys like Carlos Rodón, Max Fried, and an assortment of relievers are all doing their jobs. The biggest culprits have been guys like Ryan Yarbrough and, unsurprisingly, the struggling arms of Devin Williams, Will Warren, and Carlos Carrasco.
Warren has allowed nine-hitters to go 6-for-12 with a glaring four doubles, while the since-demoted Carrasco had given up two home runs and a 7-for-14, .500 overall.
Digging into the batter data, the biggest hitting culprits are Myles Straw (3-for-4, 2B), Ramon Laureano (2-for-3, 2 2B), and aforementioned Taylor Walls, who posted a four-hit day. Straw has actually had a good start to 2025, with the light-hitting outfielder entering Saturday with a 103 OPS+. His big game came in the blowout win over Toronto on April 27. Let’s look at his three hits.
Fried had a rough first inning that day, and his pitch count was bloated into Straw’s first at-bat, where he stung a bad fastball for a single at 104.5 mph.
His last two hits did come off of fringe pitchers Yerry De Los Santos and Tyler Matzek. Off of De Los Santos, Straw grounded a sinker up the middle that Jazz Chisholm Jr. couldn’t handle. Off Matzek, he clobbered a middle-middle fastball off the wall for a double. So, three bad pitches were hit. Makes sense. Funny enough, because of his platoon role, those three hits were Straw’s only hits between April 15 and May 6.
Next, we look at the Orioles duo of Ramón Urias and Ramón Laureano, who are a combined 4-for-7 with 3 extra-base hits out of the nine-hole. Both are also above average at the plate this year, but over larger samples than Straw.
The first Laureano double was a top-of-the-zone fastball off of Warren, which got clobbered. That said, a better route by Trent Grisham probably gets the out there. The second double was a sweeper away that he yanked fair down the left-field line. Urias’ home run came off of a flat and slow fastball by Carrasco down the pipe, while the single was a Clay Holmes Special off of Mark Leiter Jr., a swinging bunt.
Finally, let’s look at the most egregious of them all: Taylor Walls. Walls has a career 67 OPS+ and entered May 4 against Warren and the Yanks with a slash line of .151/.247/.192. He would proceed to go 4-for-5 with a double after managing just 11 hits and one home run in his previous 85 plate appearances.
He started by taking a 94-mph fastball the opposite way for a single in the fourth. The second hit, allowed by Matzek, was another poorly located fastball that was hit off the wall, albeit with some bad defense by Jasson Domínguez. The third hit was, guess what, another cookie (no pun intended) of a fastball by Carrasco. The next inning, Walls got his fourth hit on a slow groundball.
So, what can we learn from this tiny sample of nine-hitters? Almost all of the damage has been off of pitchers who are not in the team’s nucleus. Guys like De Los Santos, Matzek, and Carrasco have already or will be off the roster in the near future. Warren is a rookie who is going through growing pains.
Further, a lot of this is off of poorly located fastballs and/or the result of some bad defense. There were three different plays where better defense could’ve prevented these numbers.
While it has been frustrating, the fact that most of team’s nucleus of pitchers have taken care of business against nine-hitters should lead to positive regression for the staff as a whole. The struggles in getting nine-hitters out are more correlated with the longstanding command issues of guys that are struggling against everyone. Though the team’s inability to get out the worst hitters on opposing teams has hurt their chances thus far, it’s not something that’s likely to continue going forward.