The case for trading Marcus Stroman

01/10/2025 08:00 AM

$18.5 million is simply too much to be paying your sixth starter, even for rotation insurance.

We're just over a week into the new year, and the Yankees' priorities for the rest of the winter are coming into focus. They maintain hope that they can lure Roki Sasaki to the Bronx once the new international free agent signing period begins on January 15th. They continue to kick the tires on a number of options to fill the infield vacancy and remain engaged on a couple of their former relievers. However, one of the most impactful moves they can make in the coming weeks would be to find a trade partner for Marcus Stroman.

Yesterday, my colleague John explored the case for keeping Stroman for the 2025 season. He highlighted the lack of starting pitching depth after the team traded away Nestor Cortes and Cody Poteet already this offseason. He also noted Stroman's ability to induce groundballs paired with an increased focus on infield defense this winter. These are certainly strong incentives to hold onto the 33-year-old veteran righty, but there may never be a better chance to shed the bulk of his salary than this season.

For starters, Stroman may not even be the best in-house option for the "next man up" role in the rotation. He just endured the worst season of his career by a handful of metrics including strikeout rate (16.7%), barrel rate (6.7%), and fWAR (1.0), his FIP of 4.62 coming in at almost a full run more than his previous career average. Will Warren's small-sample-size ERA of 10.32 was pretty ugly, but with a more explosive arsenal that has shown the ability to strike out even the best hitters in baseball, there's way more upside to penciling in the 25-year-old Warren as the sixth starter in the event that any of the starting five misses time.

Stroman finds his effectiveness from living on the edges of the zone with a diverse arsenal of pitches whose divergent movement profiles keep opposing hitters off balance. He's at his best when he's limiting walks, putting the ball on the ground, and keeping the ball in the yard, and unfortunately he regressed substantially in all of these areas from which he derives his value.

A career-worst 46.4-percent in-zone rate and 25-percent called-strike-plus-whiff rate led to a 35th percentile finish in walk rate (8.9-percent). Stroman lost roughly a mile-and-a-half per hour off his sinker and cutter as well as over an inch of drop from his sinker and slider. All of this meant that not only were hitters less tempted to chase pitches out of the zone than at any point over the previous five seasons, but they were also able to make more contact when leaving the zone, spoiling pitches that in prior years might have achieved a strikeout. Additionally, the loss of downward movement resulted in by far the highest launch angle allowed of his career (9.9 degrees), causing his ground-ball rate to fall below 50 percent for the first time in his career.

2025 also saw Stroman throw the highest percentage of his pitches in the heart and waste zones as defined by Statcast — the two zones generally producing the worst results for pitchers. More pitches over the heart of the plate led to a career-high 1.11 home-run-per-nine rate while more pitches wasted far out of the zone precipitated the elevated walk rate.

Both of the nationally-recognized pitch modeling systems (Cameron Grove's PitchingBot model and Eno Sarris' Pitching+ model) saw significant regression in both stuff and command compared to the previous three seasons. According to PitchingBot, Stroman's stuff dropped from 46 to 38 and command from 52 to 39 while Pitching+ measured a drop in Stuff+ from 101 to 92 and Location+ from 101 to 96. In essence, this all paints a picture of a pitcher whose stuff is declining while his command of that stuff is becoming less precise, and it is hard to see those trend making a U-turn as he enters his age-34 season.

There is no sugarcoating it: $18.5 million is simply too much to pay to one's sixth starter. That goes doubly so when you consider the contracts signed by other starters this winter who are either well on the wrong side of the aging curve or come with serious injury red flags. The 41-year-old Charlie Morton signed a one-year, $15 million contract with the Orioles. The almost-42-year-old Justin Verlander signed the exact same deal with the Giants after missing half the season to injury and pitching to a 5.48 ERA after his return. The 37-year-old Alex Cobb also signed for a year and $15 million after making just three regular-season starts in 2024, while Michael Soroka signed a $9 million deal to start for the Nats after going 0-10 with a 4.74 ERA in 25 appearances (just nine starts) for the White Sox.

On the plus side, all of these deals tell us that teams are willing to pay decent money for a back-of-the-rotation starter without little-to-no guarantee that the player signed can deliver that expected value. This winter—perhaps more so than any point in the near future—thus appears to be a perfect opportunity to shed a starting pitcher with an undesirable contract given what teams have shown a willingness to pay to either over-the-hill or high-risk arms. $18.5 million is not that much more than Morton and Verlander are making, and with Stroman eight years that pair's junior, he's slightly better situated to come good in 2025. At minimum, the Yankees should be able to at least shed a sizable chunk of that salary.

With the money saved from dealing Stroman, the Yankees could hold firm and achieve owner Hal Steinbrenner's stated goal of avoiding the fourth and final CBT threshold of $301 million. They could also reinvest that money by attempting to convince one of the remaining free agent starters to sign in a sixth starter or long relief role. Veteran starters like Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson are both projected to at least double Stroman's projected value for 2025 and are predicted to sign for considerably less than Stroman's $18.5 million.

It always takes two to tango, and the Yankees would have to find a pitcher who is interested in an uncertain role. But in the event that a member of the rotation hits the IL for large part of 2025 the Yankees would likely rather one of those pitchers (or someone else on the open market) inherit those starts rather than risk Stroman hit the 140-inning limit that allows his $18 million club option for 2026 to vest into a player option. There are just too many incentives to moving Stroman and not enough evidence of a looming bounce-back to justify keeping him in 2025.