Why It’s Not Too Early to Worry about These Yankees Starters

It’s only 15 games into the season, but the Yankees are in last place and you should be concerned.

Yes, I know it isn’t crunch time just yet. Only four games separate the basement from the pentacle in the AL East and there’s still 147 games left for the Yankees to play, so anything can happen.

Prior to Friday’s win the Yankees had only won three games dating back to April 9th. The main culprit to blame has been the team’s fickle offense, but they’re still getting mediocre results from their starting rotation.

The team has been in a rut to start the season, and although things will (hopefully) even out eventually, there’s a few options that the Yankees should consider with these starters if the season continue to go awry.

Nathan Eovaldi: He continues to perplex the masses. Eovaldi has talent that up-and-coming pitchers would kill for, yet he remains so hittable. You would think that with a 98-mph fastball, a 76-mph curve, a biting slider and a splitter that has late life, he would be able to keep hitters baffled at the plate. His 22 strikeouts in 17.2 innings are encouraging, but his 6.11 ERA is disheartening (even though his 3.99 FIP shows he hasn’t had the best help behind him).

Eovaldi’s two biggest bugaboos are the long ball–so far he’s given up four in his first three outings–and the magical inning he has every outing where he suddenly goes into a meltdown. I’m no Larry Rothschild, but Eovaldi could transform himself with two adjustments:

• Throw more curveballs. They’re just so nasty, but Fangraphs has Eovaldi throwing benders only 7.8% of the time. The pitch is designed to keep hitters guessing, but he rarely throws them when the hitter is down with two strikes. It generally becomes a fastball-splitter battle with the occasional slider, and hitters have been catching on. This brings me to the second point.
• Attack the zone less with two strikes. Eovaldi is really good at burying hitters behind in the count. But this goes along with the first recommendation, because once he gets to two strikes Eovaldi usually goes for the knockout with a fastball or splitter near the strike zone. Hitters are learning to watch for them and fight them off until they get a mistake pitch later in the battle. Mixing up his pitch selection in pitcher’s counts and leaving a few deceptively out of the zone could help prevent the big innings against Eovaldi.

Michael Pineda: Yet another pitcher in the rotation who hasn’t lived up to his full potential. But his last outing on Tuesday (6.0 IP, 7 H, 2 ER, BB, 7 K, 0 HR) was a step forward toward the production the Yankees have been hoping for.

Pineda is as good as his slider. When he doesn’t have command of it he essentially becomes a two-pitch pitcher, and that isn’t enough to make it through multiple cycles of a lineup. His repertoire likely is what it is at this point in his career, but Pineda’s consistency has always depended heavily on controlling his slider. It’s a dominant pitch when he’s on, and that one pitch can lead to many wins for the Yankees. But if he continues to struggle with consistency, here’s one addition that could help:

• Throw more sinkers. He throws very few of them nowadays, but there’s a strategy behind an increase. Pineda’s slider and fastball both run away from right-handed hitters and in on lefties. When the slider isn’t working Pineda leans on his changeup, which mainly has downward sink. He isn’t giving batters a different look, and busting hitters with a sinker moving in the opposite direction would make him an even more dangerous pitcher. RHH would be tied in knots swinging at ghost cutters, and LHH would be expecting a pitch coming back to the middle of the plate, only to flail at a sinker running out of zone. If Pineda could successfully throw pitches moving in opposite directions, it would make him less dependent upon the slider on the days that his command is off.

Luis Severino: Looked upon to be a top-of-the-rotation type of pitcher, his initial results have been a tad worrisome: 0-2 with a 4.86 ERA and 11 Ks in 16.2 IP. Opponents are batting .352 against him.

It isn’t a horrendous stat line, but to this point it’s a far cry from the dominant stud that sailed through the system in 2015. As the BAA suggests, Severino is giving up a lot of hard contact and he knows it. Worried about the poor performance of his off-speed pitches, Severino has recently put in extra work during his between-start bullpen sessions to refine his slider and changeup.

If Severino continues to struggle while tinkering with his off-speed, the Yankees may have to do the unthinkable:

• Send him to Triple-A for a few starts. I know what you’re thinking: “What? That’s foolish! It’s Yankee blasphemy!” But as a young pitcher, it’s hard to make adjustments under the big league New York lights and not worry about the outcome. A few starts in the minors would give Severino a chance to get himself right without worrying too much about the numbers. Sending him down for 2-3 appearances would also allow the Yankees a small opportunity to save some innings on his workload, and it’s not so long that the big league club couldn’t stay afloat by inserting Ivan Nova or Luis Cessa in his place for those starts.

Of course if Sevy can turn it around in his next handful of outings then there’s no need to waste his bullets in the minors. But if he can’t get it together, I wouldn’t rule out a temporary demotion.