Yankees Finally Kick Off Their Offseason by Trading for Ryan Weathers

Though they may have failed in their reported pursuit of former Miami starter Edward Cabrera, who was ultimately dealt to the Cubs last week, the Yankees still managed to complete a trade with the Marlins for a starting pitcher. As Jack Curry of YES Network reported on Tuesday night, Ryan Weathers is on the move from Miami to New York. In return, the Marlins will receive a group of four minor leaguers from the Yankees: outfielders Dillon Lewis and Brendan Jones, along with infielders Dylan Jasso and Juan Matheus.

Frankly, it’s impressive that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman can get anything done while locked in a staring contest with agent Scott Boras over the terms necessary to re-sign outfielder Cody Bellinger. As for Miami’s side, I deeply respect the Marlins pro scouting department for looking at all the work they did scouring New York’s farm system for potential targets during the Cabrera talks and refusing to let all that effort go to waste.

Weathers, like Cabrera, still has three seasons of team control remaining before he hits free agency. This is not a rebuilding team trading contracts set to expire before its next window of contention opens. Rather, the Marlins, who are in the early stages of transitioning from rebuilding to contending, have such a surplus of starting pitching that they feel comfortable trading not one, but two established starters in favor of stockpiling additional position player talent in the minors. When Michael Baumann wrote up the Cabrera trade, he speculated that we might see debuts this coming season from Thomas White and Robby Snelling, two of Miami’s top pitching prospects who both graduated to Triple-A last year. By trading Weathers in addition to Cabrera, the Marlins are all but committing to giving one or both of them meaningful innings in the majors in 2026.

As it stands, Miami’s starting rotation will be Sandy Alcantara, Eury Pérez, Max Meyer, Braxton Garrett, and Janson Junk, with Meyer and Garrett both returning from injury. Meyer is working back from a hip impingement that may require re-working his mechanics to prevent a recurrence of the issue. Garrett will be roughly 15 months removed from UCL surgery at the start of spring training. Both should be fully healthy, but they carry the uncertainty associated with a return to form following a major injury. Meanwhile, Junk has been on the Triple-A shuttle with five big league clubs ever since his debut in 2021. Last season was his best to date, totaling 110 innings pitched with an ERA- of 98. Ryan Gusto is also in line to cover some innings, though he’s unlikely to block White or Snelling if the Marlins front office feels they’re ready to contribute.

Unlike the Cabrera trade, which netted the Fish a major league-ready outfielder in Owen Caissie along with a couple of much fringier hitters still in the low minors, the Weathers swap is for a package of four players, none of whom are true headliners, though it wouldn’t be fair to compare them to a bag of balls either. Lewis is clearly the centerpiece of the deal. Jon Heyman reported Miami’s affinity for the 22-year-old right-handed-hitting outfielder back during the Cabrera negotiations. Brendan Gawlowski, one of our in-house prospect-knowers, told me he believes Lewis will be able to handle center field, but his role is most likely on the short side of a platoon. A decent approach combined with plus power provides some upside if Lewis can still access it once he starts seeing higher quality pitching. And perhaps the Marlins feel their player development staff can clean up his swing mechanics and unlock more consistent contact.

Of the other three position players in the deal, Gawlowski would have Jones next on his pref list followed by Matheus, then Jasso. Paraphrasing his notes on the trio: Jones offers better defense in center than Lewis, but less power. The 23-year-old hits from the left side and currently lacks the bat speed necessary to support a swing that’s on the long side. Matheus is the youngest of the group at 21, having signed with the Yankees out of Venezuela at 18. He’s been playing third base since getting to High-A and seems to have good defensive instincts there, but a light arm might force a move to second. He’s a switch-hitter with good barrel control from both sides who hits for more contact than power. Jasso signed out of Mexico at age 20. Now 23, he projects to play a passable third. He bats from the right side and has decent bat speed, but he has a steep swing with plenty of miss in it, and he struggled to catch up to high velocity toward the end of last season.

The quartet of players heading to the Marlins does backfill their minor league system as they continue graduating players to the majors. And having just completed a deal with one prospect as the primary return, they opted to diversify their strategy and make a volume play, hedging their bets across four lower-tier prospects. Whether any of these players has enough upside for the hedge to pay off remains to be seen, but ideally the Marlins selected these guys because they already have specific thoughts on how to help them level up. After all, they have been scouting the Yankees system all winter.

As for the remainder of Miami’s offseason, they could choose to upgrade the roster in any number of ways, but it seems more likely that they will spend 2026 evaluating which of the young hitters on their roster will make up the core of the next contending Marlins squad. Of the group RosterResource currently projects to break camp with the team, the oldest are Kyle Stowers and Griffin Conine, both checking in at a grizzled 28 years old.

On the other side of the trade, the Yankees are facing a much different time horizon. As a general rule, the Yankees always prioritize winning in the here and now over planning very many seasons into the future, but having Prime Aaron Judge on the roster has to ratchet up the intensity on that instinct even further. Because Prime Aaron Judge is not an infinite resource. It’s impossible to know exactly how many grains of sand can pass through the hour glass before it’s gone for good, but Judge turns 34 this year.

Anyway, the Yankees will not be patiently seeking marginal improvements from a young roster. They’ll be hoping that 35-year-old Gerrit Cole can rebound from Tommy John surgery, and that needing surgery to remove bone spurs won’t stop 33-year-old Carlos Rodón from returning to his 2025 form. But since both pitchers are slated to start the season on the IL alongside fellow hurler Clarke Schmidt (who underwent the internal brace version of Tommy John last July and won’t return until the end of 2026, if at all), New York needed reinforcements. Enter Weathers.

Even though Weathers was the fall back option after the Yankees were outbid on Cabrera, that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to be excited about. Weathers has had a rough go of it with injuries the past couple of seasons, but not necessarily the type to suggest a troubling pattern; it’s not as though he’s been dogged by recurring elbow soreness or forearm tightness. He missed three months in 2024 with a strained left index finger, then was out six weeks in 2025 with a flexor muscle strain; he was only healthy for a few weeks before a lat strain knocked him out for three months. The good news is he’ll head into the 2026 season following a fully healthy offseason.

Betwixt and between last season’s IL stints, it looked like Weathers had leveled up his arsenal. Though his top line stats were slightly worse in 2025 compared to 2024, his pitch characteristics tell a different story. Overall, Weathers uses an east/west approach, with his four-seamer, sinker, and changeup breaking arm side, and his sweeper breaking glove side. The sweeper and changeup are his swing-and-miss pitches, with the sweeper generally deployed against lefties and the changeup against righties.

Because of the way changeups typically move, it’s pretty common for southpaws to avoid throwing them to their fellow lefties and go to a different secondary pitch instead. But Weathers is different. Though he does favor his sweeper against left-handed hitters, when it comes to his changeup, “He’s one of the few lefties out there who is very comfortable throwing it left-on-left,” as Marlins bullpen coach Brandon Mann explained to David Laurila last September. “When you have the ability to go to the same hand, inside, with your changeup, it opens up a lot for your other pitches. Changeups do that in general.” So instead of being one of those four-pitch pitchers who is really more of a two-pitch pitcher in practice because he splits his arsenal by batter handedness, Weathers uses his full repertoire against lefties and righties alike, giving them more distinct looks to contend with and keeping them off balance.

In 2025, Weathers built on that approach further by making a few tweaks. He added a tick of velo to most of his offerings, but most notably his four-seam fastball, which went from 96 mph to 97 mph (the average left-handed fastball sits just over 93 mph). One tick may not seem like a huge jump, but when you’re already three ticks above average, any extra juice is a big deal. Further, he increased the vertical separation between his four-seamer and his changeup, with the former adding a bit more rising action and the latter dropping more. His final tweak was adding a gyro slider as a contrast to his other offerings, which all feature dramatic horizontal break, but the bullet spin on the slider prevents it from moving more than an inch or so in either direction. Now he has five pitches that spin in the same (or mirrored) direction so they look the same at first, but then dart off in different directions.

Injuries prevented us from really getting to see what Weathers’ upgraded arsenal could do. Looking ahead to 2026, some blend of his performance in 2024 and 2025 feels like a reasonable baseline expectation (and the Steamer projections agree), but if Weathers continues to workshop those changes, he could easily exceed expectations. Further reason for optimism lies in his batted ball data. He generates a ton of groundballs (76th percentile in 2024), and even though the Yankees infield defense wasn’t stellar in 2025, they’ll benefit from getting full-season contributions from last year’s trade deadline acquisitions, Ryan McMahon and José Caballero. And regardless of the quality of the infield defense, when Yankee Stadium is your home ballpark, keeping the ball on the ground is always preferable. Even when hitters do hit it in the air against Weathers, they don’t tend to pull the ball, and fly balls hit the opposite way or up the middle are less likely to inflict damage. These batted ball tendencies hold especially true for left-handed hitters (or they did in 2024, the last time Weathers accrued enough innings to have somewhat meaningful platoon splits), which had to be particularly attractive to the Yankees given their home park’s notorious short porch in right field.

The Yankees did well in acquiring Weathers regardless of where he landed on their pref list of potential targets, especially given that they didn’t have to deal from their top-end prospects to get a deal done. Now the “worst” thing that could happen is that Cole and Rodón both return to the rotation healthy and effective, pushing some combination of Weathers, Will Warren, and Luis Gil to the bullpen (which could use some reinforcements of its own in the meantime). Nevertheless, any number of other catastrophes could befall the Yankees pitching staff, so Cashman should continue to multitask shopping for starters while he gets this whole Bellinger situation sorted out. He could also look into acquiring a shortstop who can actually hit, though admittedly there aren’t many of those lying around.