NEW YORK — The Yankees have one of the best pitching staffs in baseball. They also might not have a single reliever they can trust to finish a game.
Both things are true at once. That is the strange place the Yankees find themselves two months into the season.
The rotation ranks among the elite. Cam Schlittler owns the best ERA in baseball. Gerrit Cole is back from Tommy John surgery. Max Fried will return at some point. The starting pitching has carried the Yankees all year.
The ninth inning is a different story entirely. And the fix may end up being something almost nobody predicted.
Bednar’s struggles are no longer a small sample
David Bednar was supposed to be the answer at closer. Right now, he is the problem.
Bednar carries a 5.14 ERA and a 1.62 WHIP this season. Those are not the numbers of a trusted ninth-inning arm. They are the numbers of a reliever fighting to keep his job.
The traffic is the real Yankees concern. Bednar has allowed at least one baserunner in 16 of his 21 appearances. In 10 of those outings, he allowed at least two. Veteran columnist Bob Klapisch of NJ.com captured how far the early optimism has fallen.
“Now the Yankees are seeing the real Bednar, who has a 5.14 ERA and 1.62 WHIP,” Klapisch wrote.
It came to a head Tuesday against the Blue Jays. After Bednar struggled in back-to-back outings against Toronto and the Mets, manager Aaron Boone turned to Camilo Doval for the save. Doval nearly gave it away.
Doval is not the safety net the Yankees hoped for
Here is the deeper Yankees problem. The backup plan looks a lot like the starter.
Camilo Doval has nasty stuff. The strikeout pitches are real. But the bottom-line results have tracked closely with Bednar’s. Both carry an ERA north of 5.00. Both put runners on base far too often.
Doval’s near-collapse in the ninth on Tuesday was not about walks that night, but he did surrender a home run to George Springer in a later game. The pattern is consistent. The Yankees do not have a high-octane arm they can hand the ball to and exhale.
That leaves Tim Hill as the most dependable reliever in the group. Hill owns a 1.37 ERA and has been the face of consistency in this bullpen. But Hill is a soft-tossing lefty who pitches to contact. Building a ninth-inning plan around that profile feels risky over a long season.
This is not a new problem for the Yankees either. It is the third straight year the team has hit an early closer crisis. In 2024, Luke Weaver took over for Clay Holmes. In 2025, Weaver and Devin Williams traded the role back and forth. Williams gutted through his struggles down the stretch. This year, there is no obvious internal name waiting to step up.
Why a starter could become the Yankees’ closer
So the Yankees may have to get creative. And the answer might come from the rotation, not the bullpen.
That player is Ryan Weathers.
The Yankees acquired Weathers in January in a five-player trade with the Miami Marlins, one of the team’s bigger offseason moves. He has made nine starts and posted a 3.58 ERA. But he has never thrown 100 innings in any of his six big league seasons. That workload history points toward an eventual move.
The math is simple once the rotation gets healthy. Cole anchors the top. Fried returns. Schlittler is a budding ace. Rodon and Will Warren round it out. That is five starters. Weathers becomes the odd man out.
Klapisch laid out the path directly in his reporting.
“Weathers will eventually be moved to the bullpen once Max Fried comes off the injured list, which makes him a candidate to replace Bednar,” Klapisch wrote.
Waiting for Fried also serves a second purpose. It lets the Yankees stretch Weathers as a starter a little longer, bridging him toward an innings target before the bullpen shift. The timing works.
The stuff backs up the experiment
The case for Weathers as a closer is not just about roster math. The stuff plays.
Weathers averages 95.1 mph on his fastball, just above league average at the 63rd percentile. But he has paced himself as a starter. In short bursts, he has touched 99, 98, and a steady run of 97s. A move to the ninth inning could let him air it out in one-inning or two-inning windows.
The strikeouts are the real selling point. Weathers carries a 29.9% strikeout rate, which sits in the 91st percentile. He pairs that with a 6.4% walk rate. Power and control. That combination is exactly what the Yankees have been missing at the back of the bullpen.
There is even a recent template. In 2024, Weaver moved from a swing role to high-leverage work and gave the Yankees length and stability. Weathers fits a similar mold. He could cover multiple innings, which matters if the late-game group thins out to just him and Hill in October.
The Yankees cannot bank on the trade deadline to solve this. Too many variables sit outside their control. Prices climb. Sellers hold. The most reliable fix is usually an internal one, and right now the internal answer is not in the current bullpen at all.
It is in the rotation, waiting for Fried to come back and clear the path. If Bednar keeps slipping and Doval cannot steady himself, the Yankees may soon ask a converted starter to handle the most pressure-packed inning in baseball. It would not be the plan anyone drew up in spring training. It might be the one that makes the most sense.
What do you think?
