Yankees starters' tailspin: From first to worst
Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodon checks his grip during the second inning of a game against the Blue Jays on on June 27 in Toronto. Credit: AP/Frank Gunn
Where have you gone, Cody Poteet?
The Yankees’ rotation turns its bleary eyes to you.
Looking at the team’s recent downturn, it originates with the starting staff, the group largely responsible for cooling off the Yankees’ scorching rise to the top of the AL East over the first two months. And right on cue, the embattled Luis Gil continued the tailspin Tuesday night in the Yankees’ 5-4 loss to the Reds, giving up four runs in four-plus innings to inflate his ERA to 14.90 over his last three starts.
“It’s tough, but there’s no giving up,” Gil said through an interpreter. “You keep battling, you keep fighting. And then you turn it around.”
The Yankees’ rotation, however, has yet to pull out of this current 23-game tailspin, and the starters are mostly culpable for the 9-14 slide that began June 7, the same night Dodgers’ starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto stole the show in the Bronx.
Oddly enough, Poteet had been the rotation’s ERA leader (1.80) in his two starts during the recent malaise before joining Clarke Schmidt (lat muscle strain) on the IL with a triceps strain. We’re just spotlighting his brief cameo in contrast to the rest of the rotation going belly-up over that period, a stunning script-flip from the historic stretch that preceded it.
Remember when the rotation-wide brilliance made Gerrit Cole’s absence seem like an afterthought? And how the Yankees’ starters figured to be unstoppable once the reigning Cy Young winner returned from his spring-training elbow scare?
That narrative has been scrapped. After Gil stumbled again Tuesday — his night ended by two hit batters in the fifth inning and a monster two-run homer by No. 9 hitter Will Benson — the Yankees’ rotation is now 7-11 over the previous 23 starts, with a combined 5.77 ERA that ranks 29th in the majors during that span. The only club worse was the altitude-challenged Rockies (5.92).
On top of that, opposing hitters whacked them around at a .279 clip, the fourth-highest batting average surrendered by a starting staff, with a 1.50 WHIP that was the third-worst in MLB.
Obviously, there are ebbs and flows to a baseball season, and if this was how the Yankees began the year, especially without Cole, we wouldn’t have been completely stunned. The rotation had plenty of question marks.
But this sudden plunge has been so dramatic it seems to go beyond a simple regression to the mean. Before that June 7 line of demarcation, the Yankees’ rotation was among the very best in the majors, far outperforming expectations. The starters went 31-12 (.721) as the Yankees soared to 26 games over .500 (45-19). Their 2.80 ERA was second only to the Phillies (2.64) and 1.09 WHIP was tied for third. They limited opponents to a .206 batting average, which was the top mark in MLB.
This Jekyll-Hyde transformation, coinciding with Cole’s anxiously-awaited return, is something else to monitor. And it’s unclear how long Gil will be allowed to continue if his recent skid is attributed to growing innings-fatigue.
“We’ll see,” manager Aaron Boone said afterward. “We’ll consider everything.”
When I asked Boone before Tuesday’s game about the rotation’s tumble, he singled out each starter one-by-one, going through the list, and supplied a detail or two about their recent slip-ups.
“But I feel like with all those guys, there’s reason to believe that they should go out and perform,” Boone said. “It’s not like we’re hoping a guy that’s not any good has a good start. So there’s optimism there, but obviously we want to be more consistent, too.”
The Yankees’ rotation was like clockwork through the first two months. Their starters lasted a minimum of four innings in 76 straight games, the longest streak in the AL since 2006, before Gil got raked for seven runs by the Orioles in 1 1⁄3 innings on June 20.
Gil had been the de facto ace during Cole’s rehab, but his supporting cast wasn’t so bad, either. Perhaps most encouraging was the rebound of Carlos Rodon, who finally had pitched up to his $162 million price tag (or at least closer to it). But Rodon’s renaissance didn’t last, and he’s 1-3 with a 9.15 ERA over his four starts during the Yankees’ nose-dive.
The Yankees did Rodon the favor of moving the goalposts after Thursday’s failure, praising him for surviving five innings despite the Blue Jays pummeling him for eight runs. That’s a non-competitive outing and now Rodon is getting dangerously close to erasing all the progress he made before this month-long pratfall.
“They put some really good swings on some fastballs that I didn’t execute,” Rodon said after Thursday’s flop. “It was not fun.”
And it’s also effectively put the brakes on the Yankees’ first-half surge. The only starter who gets a pass is Cole, who clearly is still in rebuild-mode coming back from his two-month rehab for elbow inflammation, but he won’t be able to carry the load by himself once at full strength.
As for in-house help, Schmidt probably won’t rejoin the rotation until September, so the current crew needs to figure things out — fast. And we don’t mean counting on Poteet, either.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.