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The Yankees and Reds agreed to an easily overlooked three-player trade on Friday night, with New York sending former All-Star catcher Jose Trevino to Cincinnati in exchange for veteran reliever Fernando Cruz and minor-league backstop Alex Jackson.
The beauty of baseball is that sometimes seemingly small moves can pay dividends. While this particular swap won’t make the front page, there’s reason to believe that Cruz alone could end up making this transaction a winner for the Yankees.
That may seem like an outlandish sentiment to hold about Cruz, a nearly 35-year-old reliever with a career 4.52 ERA, so allow us to explain why he’s a pitcher of interest.
1. Devastating splitter
It’s not hyperbole to suggest Cruz has one of the best pitches in baseball. His splitter generated the fourth-highest whiff rate among all pitches last season, according to Statcast data, evading more than 59% of the swings taken against it. Predictably, the opposition didn’t fare well when they did manage to put lumber on Cruz’s splitter, either. They batted just .116 with a .149 slugging percentage; believe it or not, that was an improvement over the .094 average they posted against the splitter in 2023.
One of the top pitching philosophies these days implores hurlers to spam the opposition with their best pitch, no matter if it’s a fastball, a breaking ball, or something else categorized as offspeed. Cruz has taken that instruction to heart, upping his splitter usage rate to nearly 42% in 2024. Could he chuck his splitter even more often with the Yankees? It’s possible. Free-agent reliever Tommy Kahnle achieved a 73% usage rate on his changeup with the Yankees in 2024, culminating in him tossing it more than 56 consecutive times during the postseason.
2. Other low-hanging fruit
You might be wondering about the disconnect between the grand quality of Cruz’s splitter (and the resulting 37.8% strikeout rate) and the dismal state of his ERA. That disparity can be explained by his substandard command.
Cruz has walked more than 11% of the batters he’s faced during his big-league career. Worse yet, he served up nine home runs in 66 innings last year, or about one for every seven frames. Cruz’s strikeout rate is such that he’s able to withstand handing out more free passes than the average pitcher; the key, then, is for him to find a cure for his gopheritis.
It wouldn’t surprise us if the Yankees already have a remedy in mind in the form of culling his arsenal. To wit, Cruz has surrendered 15 home runs over the last two seasons; of those 15, nine have been launched against his cutter, a tertiary offering that too often finds the middle of the plate.
We can envision the Yankees asking Cruz to make two obvious tweaks to his gameplan: first, throw even more splitters; and second, do it at the expense of his cutter. That way, Cruz is emphasizing his best pitch and minimizing his worst. Would those alterations fix his control? No, but they may put him in a position to overcome it better.
3. Controllable
Did we mention that Cruz isn’t yet eligible for arbitration, or that he’s not slated to qualify for free agency until after the 2028 season?
Mind you, we don’t expect the Yankees to actually exhaust Cruz’s remaining four seasons of team control; relievers are notoriously volatile, making it difficult to foresee most of them holding their value for long, let alone well into their late 30s.
At the same time, Cruz’s cheapness and abundance of team control could serve as sweeteners if the Yankees are able to coax more from him over the coming months. If all goes well here, the Yankees might’ve netted multiple seasons of a high-leverage reliever without having to pony up or make their roster appreciably worse.
