Each year, every MLB team invites a number of players who are not on the current 40-man roster to take part in major league spring training with the roster players. The invitations give the minor leaguers a chance to impress the big-league brass, all hoping to win a long-shot place on the Opening Day roster. This year, the New York Yankees invited 27 non-roster players.
Hidden among the top prospects such as George Lombard, Carlos Lagrange and Kyle Carr — ranked Nos. 1, 4, and 13 by Baseball America, respectively — sits a largely unheralded right-handed reliever who signed with the Yankees as an undrafted free agent in 2022, out of George Washington. His name is Harrison Cohen, and he has been described by one Yankees expert as “one of the most unhittable relievers in the minors over the last two seasons.”
He went unselected over 20 rounds and 616 picks in the 2022 draft, but Cohen advanced from low Single-A to High-A to Double-A over his first professional season. Starting last season with the Double-A Somerset Patriots in the Yankees farm system, the right-hander from Syosset, New York — a town on Long Island about 30 miles east of Yankee Stadium — earned promotion to the Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders on June 14.
Cohen appeared in 29 games at the minor leagues’ highest level, all in relief, recording an impressive 1.57 ERA over 28 2/3 innings, striking out 29.
As a result, Baseball America now lists the 26-year-old as the Yankees’ No. 18 overall prospect, and the 14th-ranked pitcher.
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Now Cohen will get his chance, even if a remote one, to break camp with the major league team, with spring training getting underway just two months after the Yankees left Cohen unprotected in the Rule 5 draft — a decision that MLB Pipeline analysts Jonathan Mayo and Jim Callis rated as the toughest Rule 5 decision the Yankees had to make.
On Saturday, Brendan Samson of MLB.com named Cohen as one of the top eight “non-roster invitees to watch” at Yankees spring training.
Mayo and Callis noted that while Cohen’s fastball rates as “ordinary,” sitting in the low 90 mph range, “his mid-80s slider and slightly harder cutter have been unhittable.”
Cohen will not spend the entire spring in Yankees camp, however, as he has been selected to pitch for Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic. The Israeli team’s first game takes place in Miami on March 7, when they take on Venezuela in Pool D.
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