The Yankee bullpen and the error bar
· Yahoo Sports
Joe Torre would talk a lot, and probably still does, about how a good bullpen shortens the game. Now, he had Mariano Rivera, and the Sandman spent the better part of 20 years turning Yankee games into eight-inning affairs. When paired with a setup man like David Robertson, or a fireman like Dellin Betances, those clubs could carve out another inning or so. Sure, there was the odd blowup here and there but that consistently high floor was predictable year after year.
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In the Baby Bomber era, the Yankees haven’t had a Mariano Rivera — then again, who has? — but for how sweaty and tumultuous Aroldis Chapman was by the end of it all, he had a 3.05 ERA and struck out 37 percent of batters he faced from 2017-22. Chad Green and Zack Britton helped to shorten up games too, and that high floor of the bullpen stayed pretty reliable, a hallmark of Brian Cashman’s approach to rosterbuilding: have just enough starting pitching to get through five or six innings with the score close, your hitters will grind down the opposition and your relievers will put up zeros, and you’ll win more than you’ll lose.
Last year, and headed into 2026 though, that floor doesn’t seem to be there in the same way. David Bednar is, for my money, as good a closer as you’ll get in the game today. The unit surrounding him just carries more downside risk than we’re used to seeing from Yankee squads. The bullpen for ‘26 is projected for 4.1 fWAR, which would actually be a considerable upgrade over the past two seasons, but is at least a half-win weaker than the 2023 group, and two-plus wins worse than in ‘22 or ‘21 — side note, that 2021 season saw 7.2 fWAR from the bullpen…we used to watch gods!
More than a third of that projected fWAR comes from Bednar, and the rest highlights how high-ceiling, low-floor the rest of the relief corps is going to be. Camilo Doval and Jake Bird never really got off the ground since coming to the Yankees around the trade deadline, with Bird almost immediately optioned to Triple-A Scranton and Doval’s ERA ballooning by more than a run and a half post-deadline. His fastball isn’t as good as the pure velo would read and he walks far too many people, but in front of a competent defense you can see how some tweaks to his sinker could turn him into Zack Britton On The Cheap.
And really that seems to be the overall goal, Zack Britton or Aroldis Chapman or even Mariano Rivera on the cheap. The Yankees seemed to have learned the pitfalls of long-term contracts for relief pitchers, and given their annual payroll constraints having that kind of cost flexibility probably helps them give an extra year to a Max Fried or something similar.
However, the volatility inherent in relief pitching, the volatility that builds so much risk into longer term contracts for relievers that we know, increases in the relievers we don’t know as well. Matt Blake’s career is based around “we can rebuild him”, and he has a track record of it working, but when you don’t have the existing baseline performance of a Zack Britton or even a Chad Green, your downside risk is proportionally huger.
The Yankees will probably be fine with their bullpen, but not the perennial top 5 grouping they were at the start of the Baby Bomber era. Their rotation should be a lot better than its been in previous seasons which picks up some of that slack, but outside of the ninth inning we may be gritting our teeth more than we’re used to in 2026.