The Yankees' 'silent assassin,' Luke Weaver, has been silencing a lot of bats out of the bullpen
Yankees relief pitcher Luke Weaver reacts against the Kansas City Royals during the ninth inning in Game 1 of the ALDS at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Luke Weaver says he doesn’t like to lie.
He’s being questioned by a member of the Yankees’ social media team for an Instagram reel, and, as he’s accustomed to doing, Weaver responds with serious deliberation — as if he’s just been asked his views on Aristotelian philosophy.
The question is actually this: “What do you say your job is when an Uber driver asks?”
“I always say I work at the Stadium and hope they don’t ask what I do, and if it gets to that point, I just tell them, but they never believe me anyway,” he says in the video, pointing at the wiry frame that would seem more suited to someone in, say, accounting.
“They don’t believe me . . . ,” he repeats, trailing off wistfully.
There are . . . so many videos like this. So many.
Here’s Luke Weaver saying he didn’t call his mom for Mother’s Day (only texted), apologizing and ending his missive with, “I love you, girl.”
Here’s Luke Weaver in an interview with YES Network’s Meredith Marakovits, saying that the key to his improved fastball is orange juice — “a little bit of pulp,” he clarifies, because “the pulp is where it’s at.”
And here’s Luke Weaver after he got his first career save on Sept. 6, saying that he could give the “professional answer” about the experience but that the reality was that he was “blacked out for the most part.”
In another video, when asked to scout himself, Weaver says he’s a “silent assassin, but also lovable and caring.”
And when he comes in to pitch — lately as the closer because of Clay Holmes’ struggles — he enters to the decidedly non-intimidating “Dream Weaver,” a psychedelic hit from 1975 that promises fans that Weaver can get the Yankees through the night. “Enter Sandman” it is not, but you know what? Weaver generally does what the song promises.
A lot has been said about Weaver’s ascension: At age 30, he went from starter to reliever and reinvented himself by changing the grip on his fastball and changeup to induce more swings-and-misses. During the regular season, he had a 7-3 record with four saves, a 2.89 ERA and a 0.93 WHIP in 84 innings.
In Game 1 of the ALDS on Saturday, he pitched 1 1⁄3 hitless innings, striking out three.
Entering Monday, Weaver had not allowed an earned run in his last nine appearances, striking out 27 of the last 44 batters he’s faced and holding opponents to a .098 average. This from a guy in his first playoff appearance who also happened to have a 6.40 ERA in 123 2⁄3 innings last season.
He’s also very quirky, even by reliever standards. Believe it or not, that might have a little something to do with his career revival.
“I think it just gives him a kind of a calm, cool, collected attitude going into whatever it has,” catcher Austin Wells said Monday. “And as we’ve seen coming into his closer era, he’s let that emotion out a little bit at the end of some of these games, which has been pretty cool to see.”
It’s an interesting dichotomy: Thrust into a role reserved for the alpha of the bullpen, Weaver is content with just doing his own thing. He takes good-natured shots at his own smallish frame (6-2, but a lean 183), especially compared to the likes of Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton.
Still, he clearly doesn’t lack confidence or competitiveness. After all, it takes a certain level of swagger to tell the 3.6 million people who follow the Yankees’ Instagram account that Judge would be his emergency contact because he is “very big and I’m not very big, so if I needed to get pulled out of a fire, that’s my guy.”
It also takes a whole lot of confidence to get thrust into big October games in the Bronx and just roll with it.
“He’s really built for it,” Jazz Chisholm Jr. said Saturday. “I know nobody sees it in his attitude, but if you really go watch him go out there and get to know him a little bit more . . . he’s just a guy that’s a dog. You could be playing cards, he’s a dog. His mindset in every competition that he goes into is that he’s going to win and he’s going to do it in his way . . . Even playing cards, he’s going to mean mug you and everything.”
Of course, none of that matters much if you don’t have the stuff to match, and it so happens that Weaver does: a three-pitch mix thrown with command, with greater reliance on the cutter this year, while mostly eliminating his slider and curveball.
“You’ve got an elite characteristic fastball, good cutter, really good changeup with command that’s ramped up stuff-wise, coupled with just a solid makeup person,” Aaron Boone said. “You see him, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He’s got a real dry, funny sense of humor. But you watch him on the mound and he’s super-competitive, too, and he likes the action and likes the fire.”
It’s why that whole “silent assassin” nickname fits. It’s also why the next time he tells an Uber driver what he does for a living, the name finally might ring a bell.
With Anthony Rieber
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
