TAMPA, Fla. — Aaron Judge smashed two home runs. Spencer Jones hammered a ball toward the highway beyond right field. Carlos Lagrange hit 102.4 mph on the radar gun and had social media losing its mind.
The Yankees crushed the Detroit Tigers 20-3 on Saturday at George M. Steinbrenner Field in their Grapefruit League home opener. The final score was absurd. The home runs were spectacular. The radar readings were obscene.
And yet the most important development of the afternoon belonged to a left-hander that almost nobody was talking about heading into camp.
Brock Selvidge walked to the mound and started pumping mid-90s fastballs with sharp vertical movement. He snapped off a cutter at 90 mph that buckled hitters. He dropped tight sliders with heavy downward action. He looked healthy. He looked fast. He looked like a completely different pitcher than the one who limped through 2025.
The fireworks stole the headlines. But Selvidge may have stolen the spring.
How far the lefty had fallen before Saturday’s velocity spike
Nobody saw this coming. Heading into 2026, analysts ranked Selvidge near the bottom of their Yankees prospect list and declared that his stuff had “gone down the drain.”
The 23-year-old left-hander had legitimate reasons to be written off. A left biceps injury ended his 2024 season at Double-A Somerset in mid-July. He returned in 2025 but never looked right. His fastball, which once sat 93 to 95 mph and touched 97, dropped to around 92 mph. His strike rate fell to 61 percent. His walk rate ballooned. In 16 appearances across 75 innings at Somerset, he posted a 4.92 ERA with just 61 strikeouts and 38 walks.
Baseball America gave him a 45/Average grade heading into this season. The scouting report noted that the Yankees worked with him at instructional league to tweak his delivery and recapture the velocity he had lost during the rehab process. But the consensus was clear: Selvidge was trending toward organizational depth, not the mid-rotation ceiling scouts once projected.
The former third-round pick out of Hamilton High School in Arizona, signed away from an LSU commitment for $1.5 million in 2021, had become an afterthought.
Selvidge finds the velocity everyone thought was gone for good
Then Saturday happened.
Selvidge’s fastball averaged 95.4 mph during his outing. He blew pitches past multiple hitters, including Tigers outfield prospect Max Clark. The vertical movement was legitimate, the kind of carry that gets swings underneath the ball and generates empty hacks up in the zone.
The cutter, always part of Selvidge’s toolbox, arrived at 90 mph with hard bite. That velocity range was new and significant. It had never shown up at that level before. And the sliders he threw were tight, with tons of drop and minimal lateral movement, making them tunnel perfectly off the fastball against right-handed hitters.
On a day the Yankees will likely win this Spring Training game 11-3 with two Judge bombs, a good Lagrange outing, and a Spencer Jones nuke, I think the most promising and best take away from today's game is Brock Selvidge.
Statcast data from the outing revealed something interesting. Six of the 13 pitches tagged as sliders should have actually been classified as cutters. The variance in shape gave the Yankees pitching staff multiple looks from one arm slot. Selvidge was moving the ball well north to south, keeping hitters off balance with different speeds and angles.
He did not show the sweeper he has thrown in past seasons. Adding that pitch back would give him a genuine backend-starter profile.
Empire Sports Media’s postgame Statcast analysis put it in context: “Amid two Judge bombs, a good Lagrange outing, and a Spencer Jones nuke, I think the most promising and best take away from today’s game is Brock Selvidge.”
Lagrange, the 22-year-old right-hander from Curacao making his Grapefruit League debut, delivered 2.2 innings and topped out at 102.4 mph. His fastball averaged 99.8 mph with 17.6 inches of induced vertical break. David Cone pointed out on the YES Network broadcast that Lagrange already has a starter’s mix and does not need to add another pitch.
“Everyone wants to talk about the 103 miles per hour or whatever, but it’s more, for me, the presence that he has on the mound,” Aaron Judge said. “We’ve seen a lot of guys come and go with talent, but you have to have that kind of ‘X’ factor. You’ve got to have a good head on your shoulders.”
What a healthy Selvidge means for the Yankees’ pitching depth
The excitement over Lagrange and Elmer Rodriguez is justified. Rodriguez tossed three scoreless innings in Friday’s opener against an Orioles lineup that featured Gunnar Henderson and Pete Alonso. An American League scout assigned to the Yankees’ minor league system told Newsday he “wouldn’t be surprised if you see both of them in the big leagues at some point this season.”
But those performances were expected. Selvidge’s was not.
The Yankees will open the season without Gerrit Cole, who continues to rehab from Tommy John surgery. Carlos Rodon is targeting a return by late April. Clarke Schmidt remains sidelined. Every arm in the system matters. A left-hander who can sit 93 to 95 mph with a plus cutter, heavy slider and developing north-south game is a different proposition than the one who posted a 4.92 ERA last year.
Evaluators cautioned that Selvidge likely will not sustain a 95.4 mph average as a starter and projected him closer to 93 to 94 mph once he stretches out. His command remains a work in progress after two years of regression. But the mechanical adjustments from instructional league appear to be paying off.
Selvidge will likely begin the regular season at Double-A or Triple-A. He is not on the 40-man roster. But on a Saturday afternoon when Judge, Jones and Lagrange gave fans every reason to look their way, the sharpest evaluators in the building were watching the lefty nobody expected to matter.
