With the Yankees’ $162.5 million outlay to keep Cody Bellinger in the fold, word around the league is that the front office does not have another big move up their sleeves. However, that does not preclude the team from making improvements through additions to the margins of the roster. They still feel a pitcher light in both the rotation and the bullpen, and perhaps they likely feel they can knock out two birds with one stone given the recent rumors linking them to veteran swingman Nick Martinez.
2025 Statistics: 40 games (26 starts), 165.2 IP, 11-14, 4.45 ERA (103 ERA+), 4.33 FIP, 4.54 xFIP, 17.0% K%, 6.1% BB%, 1.21 WHIP, 2.1 fWAR
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2026 FanGraphs Depths Charts Projections: 28 games started, 159 IP, 10-11, 4.41 ERA, 4.25 FIP, 17.6% K%, 6.6% BB%, 1.31 WHIP, 1.9 fWAR
Martinez pitched the first four years of his big league career with the Rangers before heading overseas for a three-year stretch in NPB. The Padres brought him back stateside for the 2022 season, and he pitched better than his first stint in the bigs, with a 3.45 ERA in 110 games (19 starts) totaling 216.2 innings. He parlayed that performance into a two-year, $26 million deal with the Reds prior to the 2024 campaign. Martinez then logged the best season of his career, with a 3.10 ERA, 3.21 FIP, and 3.4 fWAR in a swingman role in Cincy, triggering an opt-out in his contract and leading to one of the more surprising qualifying offer tenders in recent memory. Martinez snapped up the $21.05 million salary for the 2025 season but regressed as both his ERA and FIP inflated by over a run.
Prior to last season, Martinez ranked among the game’s best at limiting hard contact, placing comfortably within the top ten percent league-wide in exit velocity and hard-hit rate between 2023 and 2024. However, in 2025 Martinez started giving up a lot more pulled fly balls, which underlies the increases in home run rate, ERA, and FIP. Most alarmingly, Martinez went from the 95th percentile in chase rate in 2024 to just the eighth percentile in 2025, resulting in a drop in strikeout rate and an almost doubling of his walk rate. His velocity and pitch movement stayed pretty stable this entire time, so it is difficult to single out a culprit for the cratering in chase rate.
That being said, Martinez possesses the tools to navigate hitters starting to do more damage. He has an expansive arsenal, throwing the cutter, four-seamer, changeup, sinker, curveball and slider each over 10 percent of the time. Having this many weapons can help mitigate the penalties associated with multiple turns through the order as a starter or reliever familiarity across a series. What’s more, Martinez is one of the best in the game at inducing downward movement across his arsenal, his cutter, changeup and curveball all placing in the 90th percentile in downward movement vs. average since he returned to MLB in 2022.
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Martinez was never better in 2025 than June 27th, when he flirted with a no-hitter at home against the Padres. San Diego didn’t get a hit until Elias Díaz doubled in the ninth.
Martinez certainly aligns with the Yankees’ apparent all-hands-on-deck, almost piecemeal approach to confronting the injuries in their rotation. Gerrit Cole is targeting a return from Tommy John rehab around May or June while Carlos Rodón should be back a little earlier after undergoing offseason surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow. Rather than target the names at the top of the free agent and trade markets, the front office has gone with more of a quantity approach. Their first two moves were to re-sign swingmen Ryan Yarbrough and Paul Blackburn on the cheap (the latter may well just be a reliever anyway). Then they traded for Ryan Weathers from the Marlins, allowing the more proven but more expensive Freddy Peralta and MacKenzie Gore to get dealt to the Mets and Rangers, respectively.
Martinez would give them another buy-low option who’s capable of deputizing short-term in the rotation at the start of the season before transitioning to a long-man role in the bullpen when Cole and Rodón return, which makes further sense given Martinez pitched much better as a reliever (2.61 ERA) than as a starter (4.72 ERA) in 2025. While not a needle-moving acquisition, Martinez is the kind of rotation insurance policy every team could use to make it through the grind of a full season.
