Concerning Will Warren stat hints Yankees role change might not fit him

The New York Yankees shouldn’t be confused about what to do with Will Warren this postseason … right? Warren’s ugly outing on Sunday at Fenway Park — 10 hits and six earned runs in five innings — all but eliminated him from New York’s list of potential playoff starters. Both Luis Gil and Cam Schlittler are more deserving of a postseason start than Warren, and the universal assumption about Warren is that he’ll be moved to the bullpen once the regular season ends.

However, the Yankees might be opening up a different can of problems by turning Warren into a reliever.

Yankees could create another dilemma by moving Will Warren to the bullpen

Sadly for Warren (and the Yankees), just because Warren doesn’t fit in the playoff rotation doesn’t mean he’ll be a good fit in the bullpen. In fact, an alarming trend for Warren — his tendency to be terrible in the first inning of starts against good teams — reads like the worst possible resumé for a prospective reliever. 

Sunday night was the most recent example of Warren’s first inning woes, of course, as he allowed all six of his earned runs in the bottom of the first against the Boston Red Sox. But this wasn’t an outlier situation for the rookie right-hander.

Back on July 2, Warren allowed a shocking seven runs in the first inning of a road start against the Toronto Blue Jays. He finished the outing with eight earned runs allowed in four innings of work.

Go back a bit further to May 31 of this season. Warren allowed four runs in the first inning of another road start against a good team, this time the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers. Warren left the mound with seven earned runs across 1 1/3 innings pitched, giving him a hilarious 47.25 ERA against the Dodgers in his young career.

Warren was able to settle down after the first inning of the Blue Jays start, and this troubling first-inning trend only suggests, if anything, that Warren needs time to warm up before locking in. That would be bad news enough if he were to remain a starter, but if you’re looking at Warren as a potential bullpen arm, this all could be used as evidence to assert that he’s utterly unusable for what the Yankees need to accomplish in 2025.

Aaron Boone and the rest of the Yankees’ leadership will make what they will of Warren’s weird (but undeniable) first-inning struggles against winning teams. Perhaps they'll view it as just another variable in what has been an up-and-down rookie campaign for him.

For what it’s worth, Warren has also been bad in general against the Red Sox this year — 1-2 with a 9.42 ERA in three starts. If New York ends up drawing Boston in a playoff series, it’s probably wise to keep Warren uninvolved in any capacity.

As far as other playoff matchups go, Boone and Co. will have a ton of explaining to do if they throw Warren into the middle of a postseason situation and don’t get a desirable result.