To get the most out of their roster, the Yankees need more than a few players to either bounce back (looking at you, Gleyber Torres and Gary Sanchez) or break out.
These three important players are intriguing candidates for the latter, either by building on the improvements they already made or from simple regression that should turn them back into one of the baddest dudes in the league.
DOMINGO GERMAN
The clock is ticking for German, who is entering his age-29 season without ever posting an ERA under 4.00 in a full season. Given some of his underlying qualities, though, there are reasons to believe that he’s ready to put it all together.
First, he should have a clean bill of health. A hip injury in 2019 kept him down for a month, then shoulder inflammation interrupted his 2021. Assuming everything goes smoothly during the lockout and the Yankees don’t overhaul their pitching staff once it’s over, German stands to have a spot in the back of the rotation. The team may be asking him to shoulder the biggest load of his career — German has never thrown more than 143 innings in a season — and one pitch in particular will be under the microscope.
His curveball is his best secondary pitch, but the ticket for German’s breakout is through his improved changeup. The pitch played especially well against left-handed batters last year, and even more encouraging, lefties had a tougher time with it than they did in 2019. (German was suspended for the entire 2020 campaign under Major League Baseball’s policy against domestic violence.)
During his career-high workload in 2019, German threw a changeup on 27% of his pitches to lefties. The results were a .238 batting average and .464 slugging percentage. Something changed last year, when he threw the pitch slightly more often and held lefties to a .121 average and .182 slugging percentage. Even better, the changeup was evading bats on a much more frequent basis. According to Baseball-Savant, lefties missed on the change on 36.4% of their swings in 2021, compared to 29.3% in 2019.
German also nearly doubled his put away percentage — the rate of two-strike pitches that result in a strikeout — on the changeup. It sat at 18.2% two years ago before exploding to 32.8%. Now, if German can make the pitch more effective against righties (who slugged .733 against the changeup in limited looks) while also gaining confidence in throwing it to them, he could have a very strong future ahead of him.
JOEY GALLO
Many people will never be able to get past Gallo’s .160 batting average in 58 games down the stretch.
Hailed as a savior in a Yankees’ lineup starved for left-handed hitters, Gallo produced 88 strikeouts and 30 hits. But he also experienced extremely abnormal results on batted balls, both from repetitive outs into the shift and a case of puzzling luck.
Consider that Gallo’s average exit velocity ranked in the 87th percentile of the league. His barrel percentage — defined as the rate of batted balls whose comparable hit types have led to a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage — was in the 98th percentile. To complete his hyper-modern Triple Crown, Gallo’s walk rate was in the 99th percentile. While those numbers measure the entire season and include his time with Texas, the exit velocity with the Yankees was right in line with his Rangers’ number while his barrel percentage slightly increased.
To phrase it a different way, almost nobody on earth hits the ball harder than Gallo. Two of the people that can stake a reasonable claim in that argument also play for the Yankees. When he’s not hitting the ball with an ungodly force, Gallo’s drawing a walk or, yes, striking out. Part of the problem in his Yankee debut was that he was striking out even more than he typically does. That is both hard to fathom given his career 36.9% strikeout rate and perhaps a sign that things will get better, because there’s very little room to get worse.
With a full offseason to digest what went wrong, presumably his first Spring Training with the club, and his track record as an unbelievably useful player (only four full-time American League outfielders have been worth more Wins Above Replacement than Gallo since 2017), Gallo should be back to his normal self in 2022.
Fewer at ‘em balls, a better approach against breaking pitches and 81 games to make Yankee Stadium his personal playground is exactly what the doctor ordered.
JAMESON TAILLON
Jameson Taillon had to learn how to become a fastball pitcher.
Like Gerrit Cole, Charlie Morton and Tyler Glasnow before him, Taillon had to unlearn the sinker that was taught to every Pirates’ pitcher in the early-2010s. In his final year with Pittsburgh, Taillon threw a sinker 20.4% of the time and a four-seam fastball 26.7% of the time. In his first year with the Yankees, the sinker percentage evaporated to 5.7% while the heater went up to 49.3%.
The results were mixed, but that’s to be expected for a pitcher making such drastic alterations on the fly. What’s undeniable is that his fastball got way harder to hit. The velocity didn’t change, it’s location did. Embracing the fastball up in the zone completely transformed the pitch. In his fifth MLB season, Taillon finally started challenging hitters in the upper quadrant of the strike zone and beyond.
What he and the Yankees saw should make them excited for the future. Opponents’ batting average, slugging percentage and weighted on-base average all decreased against Taillon’s new-and-improved four-seamer.
The biggest feather in his cap, though, comes from the whiff numbers. Like with German and his changeup, Taillon’s fastball celebrated a monumental leap in put away percentage. A pitch that caused a strikeout on just 15.8% of its two-strike usage over four years in Pittsburgh settled comfortably at 21.7% in 29 starts for the Yankees.
That’ll play.