New York Yankees: Breaking down their 2021 pitching staff

The New York Yankees are a team vying for a world title in 2021, but is their pitching staff good enough to finally get them over the top?

You’d be hard-pressed to definitively argue pitching has been an area of strength for the Yankees the last several years. Team ERA has progressively risen in each year since 2017 for the Bombers and above all issues, performance in the playoffs has been what has stifled World Series prospects for this storied franchise.

What the Yanks need right now is a pitching staff that can stay healthy and show up when the lights are the brightest, and even with all the quality additions made this offseason, those questions still firmly permeate the surrounding area of this team.

Injuries need to be considered first and foremost. Granted, when these guys are healthy and on their game, altogether it might be the best pitching staff in baseball. The problem is you’re relying on too many what-ifs in a situation like this, and that expectation that this Yankee staff will be tops in baseball will most likely never surpass status of a pipe dream.

We know what Luis Severino can do when he’s healthy, but he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery and the last time we saw him, it was shades of Chris Sale’s decline directly prior to his TJ necessity.

We know Corey Kluber is a two-time CY Young winner, but he’s also been out of action for basically two years with just 8 starts between 2019 and 2020 thanks to injuries.

We know Jameson Taillon has the potential to be a stud, but he’s now gone through two Tommy John surgeries.

We know Domingo German possesses the second-best spin rate among starters on this team, but his personal life has gotten in the way of him staying on the ball field.

From an availability standpoint, even though this Yankee rotation looks amazing on paper, we still cannot bank on it being fully operational at any point this season. It’s more likely we get to see all of these guys pitch this season but in sporadic patches. Will we get to see Gerrit Cole, Severino, Kluber, Taillon, and German altogether at once pitching every fifth day? As awesome as it would be to see that occur, each of their histories says it is more unlikely than likely.

Then we have questions of performance, and even the Yankees’ ace Gerrit Cole falls into these inquiries of doubt.

Gerrit Cole is perhaps the second-best pitcher in baseball right now behind Jacob deGrom, but one thing that plagued him in 2020 was his propensity to allow the long ball. Cole allowed 14 home runs last season in 73 innings of work, which tied him for the second-most allowed in 2020 behind only Matthew Boyd of Detroit and Trevor Williams of Pittsburgh who both allowed 15.

Not only that, but we saw Cole’s Statcast averages plummet from where they were in 2019 in the three categories of exit velocity, hard hit %, and barrel %. Exit velo dropped from the 75th percentile in 2019 to the 16th in 2020. Hard hit % dropped from the 59th percentile in 2019 to the 14th in 2020. Barrel % dropped from the 70th percentile in 2019 to the 25th in 2020.

What we saw last year was a little more than Cole being a hard thrower and inducing higher percentages of hard-hit balls thanks primarily to his velocity. Cole got a lot of swings and misses last year, but he also got a lot of squared up contact alongside them. There seemed to be no in-between state for him. He either plowed you over as a hitter or you returned him the favor. And more than any pitcher in baseball last year with the exception of two, Cole got himself bitten hard by the long ball.

He’s still great; I’m not saying he’s not. But there might be a little something to take concern about with him moving forward if he continues to be an all-or-nothing type of ace pitcher.

Questions of performance also apply to the Yankees’ three horses out of the bullpen in Aroldis Chapman, Zack Britton, and Chad Green. All three are very good pitchers and we’ve known this by the eye test for years.

Chapman and Green have terrific measurements on their ball, particularly spin rate, on top of their heightened velocity. Chapman was in the 92nd percentile last year in spin while Green was in the 89th. Zack Britton is an outlier in that his spin has always been bottom ten percentile in baseball yet we know him to be one of the league’s best relievers every year because he knows how to work a hitter better than any reliever the Yankees have. Obviously, we know what they can all do when they’re on.

But this is a case where measurables could be misleading because even though guys like Chapman and Green have fantastic measurables and Britton has always been known to outperform what his lower measurables indicated, none of it really matters in the sense that all three of these guys have serious issues with command.

Britton’s mostly stems from his tendency to throw his sinker and slider lower down in the zone that may or may not get swings and misses. Lately, guys are learning not to chase on Britton as much, so we’re seeing his command continue to regress as a result. But with Chapman and Green, we see two guys who are just plain wild and rely too much on the overpowering nature of their stuff.

Chapman has walked guys like crazy from 2017-2019, and last year was the culmination of him saying to himself that he would be better off laying the ball in there and getting smoked than surrender a free base runner. The highest barrel % Chapman ever posted in his career was a 5.6 in 2015. Last year, that was just about doubled to 11.1. Yes, 11% of the time Chapman was hit last year, the batter got the barrel on him. Quite alarming if you’re a hardcore Chapman believer.

He gets away with a lot because of his velocity and last year was case and point that batters are catching up to him.

Green, on the other hand, tends to be unique from Britton and Chapman in that he’s wilder in the zone. But it would not be fair to omit the fact that he improved a whole lot last year. He still gives up a lot of hard-hit balls- barrel % was still on the lower half of the league last year.

But Green went from the 4th percentile in barrel % in 2019 to the 32nd in 2020. In exit velo, he went from the 1st percentile to the 61st. In hard hit %, he shot up from the 1st percentile to the 95th. We know Chad Green as a guy with really good stuff but who also tends to make really bad pitches that he gets hit on. However, if 2020 was a precursor, perhaps Green can emerge as the strongest weapon the Yankees have out of the bullpen. Green is still a bit of a wild card, but improvements were made last year.