After Blake Snell signed a monstrous five-year deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, reports came out that the New York Yankees showed some interest in the left-hander. Jon Heyman has since reported that the team has held conversations with Corbin Burnes and Max Fried, who are believed to be the best starters remaining on the market. Whether the team signs Juan Soto or not seems to be the determining factor in their aggressiveness at the top of the market, but what if they end up retaining their superstar outfielder?
Suddenly, the ability to add a frontline starter is limited, but there’s a perfect solution available for the Yankees’ taking on the market. Nick Pivetta, who pitched with the Boston Red Sox this past season, has the upside and potential to take off with the Bronx Bombers as he could be the perfect Matt Blake reclamation project.
Why Nick Pivetta Could Breakout With the Yankees
One could tell two stories about Nick Pivetta, who has been a breakout candidate for years, dating back to when he first came up as a prospect.
Among all pitchers with at least 250 IP since 2023, Pivetta has the best Stuff+ (126) and is tied for fourth in Pitching+ (107) with only Zack Wheeler, Gerrit Cole, and George Kirby grading out higher. His 22.8% K-BB% is the fifth-best mark in the sport over that timespan as well, and all of these metrics would indicate that Pivetta is one of the best-starting pitchers in the sport.
There are few pitchers with as much raw talent as Pivetta, who sports a great four-seamer with excellent vertical movement to go with some devastating secondary pitches. His hammer curveball with 58.2 inches of drop is dwarfed by a sweeper that led all sliders in Stuff+ (155) in 2024, so why exactly did he have back-to-back seasons with an ERA north of 4.00?
Well for starters, no one allows home runs quite like Nick Pivetta does.
While Fenway Park and Citizen’s Bank Park aren’t what many would consider pitcher-friendly ballparks, Pivetta is due to allow at least one home run a game. In 49 of his 223 career MLB appearances, he’s allowed at least two home runs in the outing, and it caused his ERA to always hang somewhere in the mid-to-high 4s. The Red Sox seemed to figure out this issue with the introduction of his new sweeping slider last year, as he allowed a more manageable 1.37 HR/9 with a 3.32 ERA across 78.2 innings to finish the 2023 season.
This is a unicorn pitch because of the abnormal release point for a sweeper, as while the average release height and arm angle for such a pitch are 5.48 feet and 30.9 degrees, Pivetta’s is released from a 6.72-foot release height and 54.2-degree arm angle. His sweeping slider carved batters up to the tune of a 43.8% Whiff% and .175 xwOBA, but this year it lost nearly 2 MPH and had a .231 xwOBA and 35% Whiff%.
It’s a sweeper that shares a lot of similarities to Clay Holmes’ nasty whirly, with both pitches being released from a high point, but he’s had unfathomable amounts of success with his. Since debuting his sweeper in 2022, Holmes has a .152 xwOBA and 40.4% Whiff% on the pitch, and while his sweeper has more vertical drop, there are also key location differences that allow him to limit more damage than Nick Pivetta has on that pitch.
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Clay Holmes also has a tendency to miss right down the middle, but most of his sweepers are missing down and away whereas Nick Pivetta’s sweepers stay up. With a high release point, both pitchers should be able to play up the vertical drop on their pitches since hitters are usually getting a steep angle downward, but only Holmes takes advantage of that to his best abilities.
Getting more depth on his sweeper could help Pivetta, but there’s a fix that I believe the Yankees could implement rather seamlessly if they were to sign him.
Clay Holmes stands much closer to the first-base side of the rubber whereas Nick Pivetta is right in the middle of the rubber. While shifting mound positioning may not do much for some, I believe it could help with promoting more sweepers away from where hitters have been punishing Pivetta. The Yankees have been aggressive in shifting the rubber positioning of other pitchers such as Luis Gil and Jake Cousins, both of whom possess sweeping sliders that are prominent in their arsenals.
His sweeper going from good to great again would help Nick Pivetta against right-handed batters, who slugged .510 against him with a .345 wOBA. Perhaps we see the Yankees work on that cutter as well since they feature it heavily at the Major and Minor League levels, and it’s a pitch that went from devastating to firmly below-average for Pivetta. Another way that I believe the Yankees would help Pivetta is simply by getting him out of Boston.
This doesn’t have much to do with the ballpark, Pivetta actually had excellent numbers at home in Boston this season, but rather the defense that the Red Sox have employed over the last few seasons. With a -5 OAA behind him, Pivetta had abhorrent luck that stemmed from a Boston team that was highly suspect on that side of the ball.
Say what you want about the Yankees defensively, but they were a far better defensive unit than the Red Sox, and they also have superior framing metrics. New York can steal strikes for Pivetta and save runs for him, which could help his ERA and prevent some of the longer innings he had to deal with due to the American League-worst 115 errors Boston committed in 2024.
No one is turning Nick Pivetta into the 2025 Cy Young Winner (I think), but can a team make him better than he was last season? Absolutely. The Yankees are one of the best organizations in baseball at improving a pitcher’s arsenal and getting more value out of them than their previous teams did. Whether it’s Luke Weaver or Nestor Cortes, their track record speaks for itself on the pitching development side of things.
What the Yankees have to offer from that standpoint would be the best pitching infrastructure that Nick Pivetta would ever have been part of, and perhaps a change of scenery to an organization that specializes in sweepers and cutters is what he needs to take that quantum leap in 2025.