With less than two weeks remaining in the offseason, most of the moves involving the Yankees bullpen this winter have been departures.
As in two former closers, Devin Williams and Luke Weaver, heading to Queens and a handful of other relievers being nontendered.
While some of those may be viewed as additions by subtraction, the Yankees are still going to have to cover those high-leverage innings somehow, even if they have yet to bring in any new established options — more or less banking on their pitching department to work its magic once again.
The Yankees believe they did the heavy lifting of their bullpen makeover at last summer’s trade deadline, when they acquired David Bednar, Camilo Doval and Jake Bird, who were all under contract beyond 2025.
They then picked up Tim Hill’s club option, re-signed swingman Ryan Yarbrough and Paul Blackburn, added Cade Winquest in the Rule 5 draft and acquired another project in hard-throwing righty Angel Chivilli from the Rockies on Wednesday.
Fernando Cruz is an important holdover, coming off his own breakout season, while left Brent Headrick (whom multiple Yankees officials have mentioned as a candidate to pop this season) and Yerry De los Santos are among the other candidates to carve out a role in the bullpen.
“As we enter spring training, we definitely are a different bullpen right now than we were last year, because we’ve had some departures,” general manager Brian Cashman said Wednesday. “But we also have some young pups pushing up the ladder, we have a Rule 5 pick we selected, we just made this addition [Chivilli]. So I think it’s a work in progress with a lot of quality choices. Some might be emerging talented players from our system, some might be more imports like [Chivilli].
“I’d just say stay tuned.”
The best of the “young pup” pitching prospects the Yankees boast are currently starters, though someone like Carlos Lagrange — who some scouts see as a reliever in the long run — could speed up his road to The Bronx in a relief role if the organization eventually chooses to go that route. They also have a group of relievers at Triple-A that could help at some point, including Kervin Castro (added to the 40-man roster earlier this offseason), Eric Reyzelman and Harrison Cohen.
None of those are sure things, though. While even the best of relievers are volatile — in the same season he thrived as the Yankees closer in a playoff chase, Bednar was demoted to Triple-A by the Pirates — the Yankees could still use another arm or two that are closer to safe bets to give Aaron Boone enough trustworthy options for the late innings.
They sat out the high-end (and now most of the mid-tier) portion of the free agent relief market, with those dollars reserved for Cody Bellinger, though the Yankees have had their best success acquiring impact relievers through trades in recent years.
“We’re going to continue to evaluate all choices that come our way,” Cashman said. “But I do think we have a lot of quality choices at the very least that we can fall back on if we do nothing more. But the job at hand is to see if we can improve in any aspect of the roster we can and we’ll continue to look at that.”
Perhaps they eventually get some relief from the rotation once the likes of Carlos Rodón, Gerrit Cole and eventually Clarke Schmidt get healthy, but until then, they seem to be putting an awful lot of faith in their pitching department — getting Bird back on track, continuing Blackburn’s transition to relieving, trying to harness Chivilli’s big arm and get something out of the rookie Winquest, among others.
The other issue with the projected 2026 bullpen is a lack of flexibility. Only Bird, Chivilli, Headrick, Doval and Cruz have minor league options remaining — and if they are used on Doval or Cruz, they will have bigger issues than flexibility — while they must carry Winquest on the big league roster all season if they want to keep him in the organization. For a team that often churns through arms with the last spot or two in the bullpen, that may prove to be more difficult this year.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
