NEW YORK — Aaron Boone handed Camilo Doval a tie game in the 11th inning Wednesday and asked him to hold the Yankees line against the Tigers. The right-hander threw 21 pitches, only 10 for strikes, walked three hitters and allowed four runs, two of them earned.
The 6-2 loss at Yankee Stadium stretched the Yankees’ losing streak to seven games, part of a slide that has cost the club 11 of its last 14 and its grip on the AL East race and pinned the defeat on Doval, who has now blown three saves in 37 appearances this season.
One meltdown does not define a reliever. Doval’s season has offered a pattern. He carries a 4.96 ERA and a 1.26 WHIP with 32 strikeouts and 10 walks, per Empire Sports Media, in his first full season with the Yankees, and Boone has kept finding him high-leverage innings anyway.
The frustration around the Yankees is not just about the results. It is about how familiar they look.
Nearly every warning sign in Doval’s 2026 profile was visible before the Yankees ever acquired him, in his San Francisco track record, in the analysis published the day of the trade and in his first two months in pinstripes last summer.
A gamble that was flagged the day it was made
The Yankees landed Doval from the Giants in the final hour of the 2025 trade deadline, sending three prospects west, including catcher and third baseman Jesus Rodriguez, according to FanGraphs. The appeal was obvious. Doval was a 2023 All-Star with triple-digit velocity and club control through 2027. He arrived in the same three-hour deadline flurry that brought David Bednar from Pittsburgh and Jake Bird from Colorado, a spree FanGraphs said rebuilt nearly half the Yankees bullpen in an afternoon.
The caution flag went up immediately. FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski, analyzing the deal the day it happened, praised the stuff while naming the exact flaw that surfaced Wednesday night.
“No matter how good, a closer with a knack for allowing ball fours is a good source of baseball-induced anxiety,” Szymborski wrote in August 2025.
The early returns backed the skepticism. Doval posted a 4.82 ERA over 22 appearances for the Yankees down the stretch last season. The Yankees still opened 2026 with him penciled in as the primary setup man for closer David Bednar. He has since pitched his way out of that role.
The stat that followed him from San Francisco
The clearest red flag lives in one number. Doval is stranding just 58.8 percent of the runners he inherits or puts on base this season, a mark near the bottom of baseball.
That is not a new problem. Even during his All-Star 2023 season with the Giants, Doval posted a below-average 65.6 percent strand rate. When traffic builds, runs tend to follow, which makes him a dangerous choice for the Yankees with an automatic runner standing on second base in extra innings.
The 28-year-old’s underlying numbers have also thinned. His 8.8 strikeouts per nine innings is a career low, and he has already allowed five home runs. His control has been fine at 2.8 walks per nine, but Wednesday showed how fast one inning can unravel, and how much one inning costs a Yankees team with no margin left.
The stuff has not disappeared. The trust has. Postgame analysis of the meltdown observed that once a reliever begins handing out free bases in extra innings, every future appearance carries a louder sense of risk.
A B-minus bullpen with a broken bridge
The strange part is that the Yankees bullpen has been productive around Doval all season. The unit entered Thursday with a 3.19 ERA, the best mark in the American League and second in MLB behind only Atlanta’s 2.72.
One midseason report card still graded the group a B-minus, and the reasoning pointed straight at the late innings. The review acknowledged the bullpen’s high-level talent and hard-to-ignore numbers while arguing that the path to Bednar should be smoother.
Doval was supposed to be that path. Instead, Boone’s most trusted bridge arms are Fernando Cruz and Brent Headrick, with Tim Hill enduring a subpar year and Ryan Yarbrough and Paul Blackburn filling long relief roles rather than high-leverage ones. That gap between the group’s overall numbers and the shaky route to the ninth is where Doval’s season has hurt the Yankees most.
Thin alternatives leave the Yankees exposed
Internal reinforcements are scarce. Rookie Yovanny Cruz has allowed two baserunners and no runs over 4.1 innings in three appearances while touching 100 mph, but he remains untested. Triple-A flamethrower Carlos Lagrange, who was being converted to relief for exactly this purpose, landed on the injured list Thursday with a shoulder problem, closing off the Yankees’ cheapest path to a homegrown power arm.
That leaves the Aug. 3 trade deadline as the most realistic fix, and the Yankees are expected to hunt for at least one or two bullpen arms before then.
Boone has not announced any change to Doval’s role. The Yankees open a series against the Twins at Yankee Stadium on Friday, and the next tight game will pose the same question Wednesday did: whether the manager keeps running a reliever whose biggest flaw was documented before he ever put on a Yankees uniform.
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