Sunday Night Was Rough, but Carlos Rodón Has Bounced Back

NEW YORK — Carlos Rodón was cruising until he wasn’t. After shutting out the Red Sox for the first four innings on Sunday night in the Bronx, Rodón scuffled while facing Boston’s hitters a third time, serving up two homers and allowing five runs before making an abrupt departure in the sixth inning of what became an 11-7 loss. It was a rare bum note from the 32-year-old lefty, who has stepped up to help the Yankees overcome the losses of Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil, pitching well enough to merit All-Star consideration.

Through four innings of an AL East rubber match between the first-place Yankees (39-25) and fourth-place Red Sox (32-35), Rodón had allowed only one hit and one walk while striking out four. He hadn’t thrown more than 16 pitches in any inning, had gotten first-pitch strikes against nine out of 14 hitters, and had allowed just one hard-hit ball: a 109.9-mph grounder by Ceddanne Rafaela that became an infield hit in the third. That play was compounded by a Jazz Chisholm Jr. throwing error, but it turned out to be of no consequence.

In the fourth inning, Rodón issued a two-out walk to Carlos Narváez, who to that point was just the second hitter he’d fallen behind 2-0 all night. It was the start of a trend. He went 2-0 against Abraham Toro before getting him to pop out to lead off the fifth, and after falling behind Trevor Story, induced him to pop out as well. To that point, he had retired 14 out of 16 batters, but he would get just one of the next five. Rafaela, the owner of a 42.7% chase rate (fourth-highest in the majors) wouldn’t bite at any of Rodón’s first three pitches, all well outside the zone, and ended up drawing a rare walk. Two pitches later, Kristian Campbell sent an up-and-away fastball just to the left of the foul pole in Yankee Stadium’s short right field, a towering 99-mph, 38-degree drive that didn’t slice. The runs snapped Rodón’s 18-inning scoreless streak, which dated back to the final inning of his May 16 start against the Mets. The homer was much less emphatic than Aaron Judge’s 108.6-mph, 436-foot blast off Red Sox starter Hunter Dobbins in the first inning, but it tied the game nonetheless. Rodón then struck out Jarren Duran chasing a low-and-away slider to end the frame. It was his 15th whiff on the night (six via his slider, five on his sinker, three on his four-seamer, and one on his change-up), and his fifth and final strikeout.

DJ LeMahieu’s short-porch solo shot off Dobbins in the bottom of the fifth restored the Yankees’ lead to 3-2, but Rodón continued to sputter. He hit Rafael Devers on the triceps with a sinker, then walked Rob Refsnyder on five pitches. After a visit from pitching coach Matt Blake, Narváez mashed a high, up-and-in 94.6-mph four-seamer to left field for a three-run homer, giving the Red Sox a 5-3 lead and ending Rodón’s night in frustrating fashion. It was just the second time in his last 10 starts he’d allowed more than two runs. Relievers Fernando Cruz and Tim Hill made matters worse by allowing three more hits and two more runs before the inning ended, and while the Yankees kept clawing at the Red Sox bullpen, their own relievers kept serving up homers, with Judge’s second two-run shot of the game in the ninth inning providing a fig leaf of cover on a bad late-innings stretch by the Yankees.

“He lost the zone a little bit. Walk, hit batter, then Narváez clips him,” said manager Aaron Boone afterwards when asked about Rodón’s fifth inning. “But up to then, I thought he really threw the ball very much in line with who he’s been all year. I thought the mix was good.”

“Just falling behind hitters and giving out free bases, it’s a no-go,” said Rodón. Regarding the two four-seamers that the Red Sox hit for homers, he said, “Campbell puts a good swing on the ball away. The one up and in [the Narváez homer] I executed, but he makes a better swing. Obviously [I was] looking for a swing-and-miss, and I just need to be better.”

Far more often than not this season, Rodón has been better. In his third year in pinstripes, he’s finally pitching up to the All-Star level that led the Yankees to sign him to a six-year, $162 million contract in December 2022. He and fellow lefty Max Fried, the team’s biggest free agent addition this past winter, have propped up a rotation that has weathered the losses of not only Cole (Tommy John surgery) and Gil (lat strain), but also Marcus Stroman (left knee inflammation) and Clarke Schmidt (rotator cuff tendinitis). Schmidt is the only one who’s returned thus far.

It’s been a long road back for Rodón. In his first year with the Yankees, he was lit for a 6.85 ERA and 5.79 FIP while dealing with chronic lower back woes as well as forearm and left hamstring strains. He rebounded to pitch respectably last year, making a career-high 32 starts totaling 175 innings, with a 3.96 ERA (98 ERA-) and 4.39 FIP (104 FIP-) thanks to much-improved strikeout, walk, and home run rates. His postseason performance was uneven, as he didn’t make it out of the fourth inning in either his Division Series start against the Royals or his World Series start against the Dodgers, but he was effective in two turns against the Guardians in the ALCS, allowing a total of three runs in 10.2 innings while striking out 15.

Rodón has taken it to the next level this year, missing a ton of bats, limiting hard contact and — no small matter within the banged-up rotation — eating innings. Even with Sunday’s hiccup, he ranks second in the AL in xERA (2.68), third in innings (84.2), fourth in strikeout rate (31%), eighth in WAR (1.8), and 10th in both ERA (2.87) and FIP (3.27). The key to his rebound has been a willingness to reinvent himself. His success in 2021 with the White Sox (2.37 ERA, 2.65 FIP, 5.0 WAR) and in ’22 with the Giants (2.88 ERA, 2.25 FIP, 6.2 WAR) was founded on an exceptional four-seam/slider combination that he relied upon about 86% of the time in the earlier year and 92% of the time in the later one. The approach worked well, as he was able to overpower hitters, but, as he told The Athletic’s Chris Kirshner in March, “The game changed… Guys have trained different. They can hit hard fastballs with vertical movement.”

Rodón has responded by expanding his arsenal and adding more finesse and unpredictability to his approach. A changeup that he had more or less mothballed from the end of 2021 until the middle of last season has become a particularly effective pitch against righties, who are slugging just .291 against him, down from .454 last year and .510 in 2023. Likewise, a sinker that had basically been on the shelf since 2018 has become a weapon against lefties. Hitters have produced groundballs more than 50% of the time they’ve put either of those refurbished pitches into play, so his overall 42.6% groundball rate is his highest since 2019, and nearly 10 percentage points higher than last year.

Here’s his usage graph against righties:

Here it is against lefties (note that the discontinuous orange line for sinkers picks up with a dot for 2025 at 24.5% on the far right):

And here’s how his 2025 results look:

According to Statcast, Rodón’s slider has been 11 runs above average, second only to Chris Sale, who throws the pitch nearly half the time. His four-seamer has been five runs above average; it had ranked among the top 20 before Sunday night. Both pitches were much less effective last year, with Statcast values of -2 runs for the slider (batters hit .191 and slugged .361 against it, with a 39.3% whiff rate) and one run for the fastball (batters hit .262 and slugged .514 against it, with a 21.4% whiff rate).

For Rodón, the element of surprise has been important, as he told the New York Post’s Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman in a lengthy podcast spot last week. “If we dive into the arsenal, the usage has kind of been, I guess you could say, sporadic… It’s just hard [for hitters] to get a grasp of, is it gonna be fastballs? Gonna be sliders, gonna be changeup, or in fastball counts, they’ll get sinkers… I think that’s kind of the difference in this year. It’s hard for hitters to jump on the four-seam, they’re not sure when they’re going to get it, and sliders are kind of in between, because sliders are backdoor for strikes or in zone, and then they’re out of zone.”

His evolution wasn’t a one-man effort. Blake helped steer Rodón away from his two-pitch attack starting in the middle of last season, and his tendency to overcorrect to a heavy offspeed approach if he failed to establish the fastball early. “I think that attests to a lot of work that our staff, our pitching staff, our coaching staff has got me to get to this point,” he continued. “You look at the catchers, what they’ve done as far as game calling and just playing the chess match, the game within the game, [they’ve done] really well… They call pitches, I try to execute. Very rarely do I shake.”

For Rodón, it was hard to let go of what had worked. “When I reflect on the two-pitch mix I used to feature for two years that was really dominant… When you strike out 11-12 per nine [with a] fastball/slider [combo] and you’re blowing guys away, it’s hard to say, ‘Let’s make an adjustment.'”

As this was Rodón’s first time facing several of these hitters on Sunday, he said he’d have to review video to see what he could take with him into his next start against the Red Sox. He won’t have to wait long, as the two teams face each other next weekend at Fenway Park. If the Yankees stay on turn, he’d pitch Saturday.

Judge, for one, expects him to rise to the occasion. “He’s a guy that attacks the zone well, gets ahead, he’s got two or three wipeout pitches to put guys away with,” said the Yankees captain on Sunday. “That’s who I want on the mound in any big spot, any big situation. I know he’s going to go after guys, attack guys. He had a couple tough spots today, but I know he’s a guy that’s gonna bounce back and be ready for his next one.”