Yankees Pin Hopes for Extending Their Season on Carlos Rodón, Again

The Yankees got absolutely thrashed by the Blue Jays during the first two games of the Division Series, losing Saturday’s opener 10-1 and then again on Sunday, 13-7. To be fair, the first game was tight right up to the seventh-inning stretch, after which the Blue Jays expanded their 2-1 lead with four runs apiece in the seventh and eighth innings, but by the same token, Game 2 wasn’t even as close as that six-run margin suggests. The Yankees not only trailed 12-0 through five innings, but also were no-hit by Trey Yesavage through 5 1/3 innings before breaking through against reliever Justin Bruihl in the sixth. Now, for the second time in less than a week, they’ll turn to Carlos Rodón to face an AL East rival with their season on the line.

The 32-year-old Rodón started Game 2 of the Wild Card Series against the Red Sox, one night after Garrett Crochet and Aroldis Chapman stifled the Yankees in the opener. Rodón held the Red Sox to three runs in six-plus innings, getting by with more than a little help from his friends. He retired the first six batters he faced before running into trouble in the third inning. Jarren Duran, the lone lefty in the lineup, singled, then Ceddanne Rafaela worked a walk, with Rodón exacerbating the situation with a throwing error on switch-hitter Nick Sogard’s sacrifice bunt. Though he recovered to strike out lefty-masher Rob Refsnyder, both runners scored on a sharp single by Trevor Story. Rodón escaped further damage when he induced Alex Bregman to ground into a double play that began with an acrobatic spin move by second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr.

After a clean top of the fifth, Rodón was briefly staked to a 3-2 lead thanks to Aaron Judge’s RBI single, but it proved short-lived. Rodón fell behind Story 2-0 to lead off the fifth, then threw him a meatball, a 95.2-mph four-seamer that ended up in the middle of the strike zone and was hammered 381 feet to left field for a game-tying home run. A four-pitch walk to Bregman put him on the ropes, but he recovered by retiring Romy Gonzalez on a popout, then getting Carlos Narváez to ground into an around-the-horn double play. With his pitch count at a reasonable 82, manager Aaron Boone sent Rodón back out to start the seventh, but he walked Nate Eaton on four pitches, threw a wild pitch that sent him to second, then grazed Duran with a 3-0 pitch. Reliever Fernando Cruz managed to clean up the mess without further damage, aided by a stellar diving stop by Chisholm on a Masataka Yoshida infield single that, had it not been stopped, probably would have plated both Duran and Eaton. The Yankees scored what proved to be the decisive run in the eighth, when Chisholm worked a walk against Garrett Whitlock, then raced home on a long single into the right field corner by Austin Wells.

For the night, Rodón threw 91 pitches, yielding four hits and walking three while striking out six. He generated 16 called strikes and 10 whiffs, five with his changeup, four with his slider, and one with his four-seamer; both his 28.5% called strike and whiff rate and 11% swinging-strike rate were a bit below his regular season marks (29.5% and 12.4%, respectively), each of which ranked in the 80th percentile or higher among ERA qualifiers. Contact-wise, his average exit velocity of 93.3 mph and 50% hard-hit rate were further off his season marks, though Story’s homer was the only ball the Red Sox barreled.

Rodón is coming off a strong campaign, one that represents a vast improvement on the first two seasons of his six-year, $162 million deal, even if it wasn’t quite as dominant as his career-best 18-9 record suggests. He set career highs with 33 starts and 195 1/3 innings, tying for second in the majors in the former and fourth in the latter. Additionally, he ranked seventh among AL qualifiers in strikeout rate (25.7%) and eighth in ERA (3.08). While both his strikeout rate and 9.3% walk rate represented slight steps in the wrong direction relative to 2024, he posted the AL’s lowest batting average allowed among qualifiers (.187) and cut his home run rate from 1.59 per nine to 1.01, part of a vast improvement in his contact profile:

In Rodón’s first season with the Yankees — one in which he was limited to 14 starts due to forearm and left hamstring strains as well as back stiffness, which required a cortisone shot — he ranked near the very bottom among qualified pitchers in both average exit velocity and barrel rate. Two years later, he was well above average in those departments, with a career-low average exit velo as well as his lowest average launch angle since 2017.

That latter mark coincides with Rodón’s vastly improved groundball rate. His 9.6-point jump from 2024 (33.8%) to ’25 (43.5%) ranked third in the majors among pitchers with at least 50 innings in both seasons, behind Griffin Canning (10.2%) and Tanner Bibee (10.1%). That jump owes something to Rodón’s reconfigured repertoire. This year, he regularly used a sinker for the first time since 2018, throwing it 31.3% of the time against lefties, who hit just .119 and slugged .143 against it, while whiffing on 31.9% of their swings, though just 3.2% of the time against righties, who hit .364 and slugged .409 against it, albeit in just 23 plate appearances.

Batters hit groundballs on 57.7% of the 52 sinkers they put into play, the highest rate among Rodón’s offerings save for his curveball, which produced just seven balls in play:

During Rodón’s media session before the Wild Card Series opener, I asked him about the “new” pitch, which he reintroduced in collaboration with the Yankees’ analytics department and coaching staff. “[When] I came in the league, I had what you call a two-seamer. Back then we didn’t have quite the movement plots that we do now and understanding pitch movement and pitch profiles the way we do now,” he said. “So it was slightly a different pitch, and the grip was slightly different. I had an idea of how to throw what you call a sinker, two-seamer from throwing it eight, nine years ago… we just stumbled upon it and the Yankees pitching department refined it. [Pitching coach] Matt Blake had a hand in that, [assistant pitching coach] Preston [Claiborne] had a hand in that. We went with it.”

Rodón’s sinker comes in slightly slower than his four-seamer (averaging 91.9 mph vs. 94.1) with almost a foot more drop (6.3 inches of induced vertical break vs. 17.6 inches) and more arm-side movement (14.6 inches vs. 10.8 inches). Before Rodón’s Wild Card Series start, Boone described the lefty’s evolution, saying, “He is a more complete pitcher, [has] more ways of beating you now.” More:

“For the bulk of his career, he was that fastball-slider guy, big four-seam fastball up in the zone with the wipeout slider. As he has navigated these last couple of years and obviously had a lot of success for us the last couple of years, he’s evolved that arsenal a little bit… He still has a four-seam [and] slider that’s bread and butter for him. Now he is incorporating the sinker. The changeup is a really good pitch for him now. He can slow you down and spin it in there.

“He has a lot of different ways to go about it now. There’s been a lot of different games where something different has been featured and really been that go-to pitch for him. Add it all up and it has been a really strong year.”

The other notable aspect of Rodón’s evolution has been a greater effort to control his emotions. His experience pitching big games, as well as his talking to some of the Yankees’ big-game pitchers of yesteryear, seems to have helped. “I learned fairly quick last year that things need to be in check, and [I need to] save that energy for some extra innings down the road,” he said of the extent to which he dialed back his celebration of strikeouts. After his rough 3 2/3-inning, four-run start against the Royals in Game 2 of last year’s Division Series — a start that began with the very amped-up lefty strutting around after striking out five of the first eight hitters he faced before things escalated — he spoke to Andy Pettitte (now a Yankees advisor) and Gerrit Cole (currently serving as a quasi-assistant pitching coach as he rehabs from Tommy John surgery). “Those two, after that start, got my mind where it needed to be,” he said.

As for how all of this will translate to Tuesday’s critical start, Rodón has his work cut out. The Blue Jays tied for third in the majors with a 111 wRC+ against lefties, and in the two times they faced Rodón — both at the Rogers Centre, within a span of 22 days — they chased him after five labor-intensive innings:

• On June 30, Rodón burned through 96 pitches, allowing five hits and three walks but just two runs while striking out four. Boone brought him out to start the sixth with the Yankees ahead 2-1, but pulled him after he yielded a leadoff double to Davis Schneider, then watched the bullpen melt down to allow four runs in what ended up as a 5-4 defeat.
• On July 21, six days after Rodón threw a scoreless inning in the All-Star Game (his first appearance in three trips to the Midsummer Classic), he threw 107 pitches, allowing six hits, five walks and four runs, all in the fifth; the big blow was a two-run double by Bo Bichette, who is out of commission for this series due to a left knee sprain. After Rodón won a 14-pitch battle (!) to get Schneider to pop up for the second out, throwing errors by third baseman Oswald Peraza and shortstop Anthony Volpe made the last two runs unearned.

To Boone’s point about Rodón’s having different go-to pitches in different outings, in the first of those two starts against Toronto, his four-seamer (37.5%) and slider (34.4%) accounted for nearly three-quarters of his offerings, while in the second, his four-seamer (50.5%) and changeup (25.2%) made up over three-quarters of his pitches. The Jays were all over that slider, hitting .364 and slugging .545 against it while whiffing on just 5.3% of their swings, but they hit a more modest .222 and slugged .333 against the four-seamer, whiffing on 21.4% of their swings. Rodón threw his sinker just 8.2% of the time in those two games, with batters swinging at just six of the 17 he threw them, whiffing on two (one for strike three), fouling three off, and hitting one 100.1 mph to center field for an out.

If manager John Schneider matches what he did against the left-handed Max Fried on Sunday, the only lefties in the Blue Jays lineup might be center fielder Daulton Varsho (who went 4-for-5 overall, with two doubles in two at-bats against Fried, plus two homers off righty Will Warren) and second baseman-turned-shortstop Andrés Giménez (who struck out and singled against Fried). Varsho hit for a respectable 99 wRC+ in 56 plate appearances against lefties this year and owns a career 90 wRC+ against them; Giménez managed just a 39 wRC+ in 86 PA against them this year but similarly owns a 92 wRC+ against them for his career, with his defensive advantage over Bichette helping to offset the loss of the latter’s 143 wRC+ against lefties this year. Righties Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (163 wRC+ against lefties), Ernie Clement (146 wRC+), and George Springer (132 wRC+) gave lefties a hard time, and both Alejandro Kirk (113 wRC+) and Davis Schneider (106 wRC+) were at least solid. Particularly with Tim Hill the only lefty reliever the Yankees are carrying in this series, having a platoon disadvantage isn’t going to be much of a concern for Toronto.

Rodón recognizes the challenge, saying in his media session on Sunday, “There’s not a lot of miss. They’re tough to strike out. They force action. They put the ball in play. They make teams play defense. They’re pretty athletic. There’s also slug within the lineup. And it makes it tough. There’s times where you need a strikeout, and just the miss isn’t there. They seem to have a really good understanding of the zone as well. So the chase is low… they have a good idea of what they want to do at the plate.”

Regarding that lack of swing-and-miss, the Blue Jays had the majors’ third-lowest swinging-strike rate (9.4%) and lowest strikeout rate (17.8%), with players such as Clement (10.4% strikeout rate), Kirk (11.7%), and Guerrero (13.8%) particularly difficult to punch out. That said, Toronto’s 28.9% chase rate was actually the majors’ ninth-highest mark, though the Jays did have the highest out-of-zone contact rate (63.6%) by four full percentage points — which generally works in a pitcher’s favor. Kirk’s .305 average and .356 slugging on pitches outside the zone were by far the best marks on the team.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Blue Jays — who will counter Rodón with Shane Bieber — are squarely in control of this series, after winning the division on the basis of their 8-5 series advantage during the regular season. For as well as Rodón has pitched in 2025, and for as well as he may end up pitching Tuesday night, it still may not be enough for the Yankees to stave off elimination.