Yankees Acquire Tyler Clippard from Diamondbacks

The New York Yankees have acquired reliever Tyler Clippard from the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for minor league pitcher Vicente Campos.

The Yankees followed up Sunday morning’s trade of closer Andrew Miller to the Cleveland Indians by bringing in veteran reliever Tyler Clippard from Arizona to take his place. The 31-year-old Clippard has had mixed results (4.30 ERA in 37.2 IP) with the Diamondbacks in 2016, but has a solid track record as a set-up man the past few years.

The move feels similar to the recent acquisition of former Yankee Adam Warren in the Aroldis Chapman trade. Like Warren, Clippard is a former Yankees farmhand who is having a disappointing season. He hasn’t pitched for New York since 2007, but was selected by the club in the ninth round of the 2003 amateur draft and played three seasons in their minor league system.

Unlike Warren however, who was basically a throw-in, Tyler Clippard comes at a real cost to the Yankees. The team shipped young starting pitcher Vicente Campos (formerly Jose Campos) to the D-Backs in a one-for-one swap. 

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Campos was only ranked the number 14 prospect in the Yankees system by MLB Pipeline before the deal, but he had made tremendous strides this year and has legitimate front of the rotation upside. He had a 2.76 FIP in nine starts for Double-A Trenton before a recent promotion to Triple-A.

The second piece in the trade that brought Michael Pineda to the Yankees, Campos has never topped the 100 inning mark before this year because of a variety of different injuries, including the TJ surgery that caused him to miss the entire 2014 campaign.

That injury risk is the reason Arizona is able to acquire Campos for a mediocre reliever, but this does feel like a trade that could really come back to bite the Yankees.

It’s nice that the Yankees are attempting to keep some semblance of a major league bullpen together even after trading their two best relievers, but Clippard could end up being a disaster with New York. He’s an extreme flyball pitcher with home run issues who is moving to a bandbox in the AL East. Maybe not the best fit, but we’ll see.

The trade likely leaves Clippard and Warren as the primary set-up men for newly anointed closer Dellin Betances. It’s not the shut-down pen that Yankees fans have gotten used to, but hopefully it will keep the club respectable.