Yankees 2025 Roster Report Cards: Carlos Rodón

Carlos Rodón didn’t make a great first impression in pinstripes. Signed to a six-year free agent deal before the 2023 season, the left-hander was coming off a 237-strikeout campaign and expected to slot behind Gerrit Cole as a formidable duo atop the Yankees’ rotation. Instead, he missed the season’s first three months with multiple injuries and, upon his return, was nothing like the two-time All-Star who had shone in Chicago and San Francisco. The 30-year-old got badly exposed, going 3-8 with a 6.85 ERA and punctuating his season with an unthinkable showing in which he was charged with eight runs and failed to record an out.

Rodón bounced back reasonably well in his second year in New York, winning 16 games for a pennant-winner. Still, his 3.96 ERA was a far cry from the 2.67 mark he registered in his last two years before becoming a $162 million man. That, paired with an inconsistent postseason in which he was criticized for letting his emotions get the better of him, were surely factors in the Yankees’ pursuit of Max Fried as Cole’s new running mate. That acquisition, alongside Luis Gil’s Rookie of the Year campaign and a Clarke Schmidt breakout, left Rodón’s status as a front-of-the-rotation starter very much in jeopardy.

Then the injury bug hit. First Cole, then Gil, and eventually Schmidt all went down for long stretches of the season. Rodón became an unlikely Opening Day starter. What was even more unlikely is that he lived up to the billing.

Grade: A-

2025 Statistics: 18-9, 3.09 ERA, 195.1 IP, 203 K, 132 ERA+, 3.78 FIP, 9.4 K/9, 2.8 BB/9, 3.2 fWAR

2026 Contract Status: Under contract, $27.8 million

Rodón earned the win on the season’s first day, one of an eventual career-high 18. In a season that saw tremendous turnover in the Yankees’ rotation, the veteran was its most consistent member, making 33 starts without recording a losing record in any month. He did it not through his old formula of punching out the world — Rodón’s 9.4 K/9 rate, while still above average, was a far cry from the 12.0 mark that led the majors in 2022. Instead, he led the league in another metric which had not been his friend the previous two seasons: hit rate. The southpaw held opponents to 6.1 hits per nine innings, a career best that allowed him to drop his WHIP to 1.05. His slider, an effective secondary pitch throughout his career, was nearly unhittable, limiting opponents to a .133 batting average against while racking up 12 runs of value, making it the third-most valuable slider among all starters in baseball, behind only Chris Sale’s and Jacob deGrom’s.

In addition to consistency and dominance, Rodón also gave the Yankees length. He pitched at least five innings in all but one of his starts (a 4.2-inning effort), avoiding the types of blow-ups that over-tax a bullpen. The 32-year-old’s longest outing of the year was likely also his best, an eight-inning, no-run show of dominance against the Cubs in which he struck out eight while throwing 109 pitches, also tops on the year.

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Along the way, he made his third All-Star appearance (the first with New York) and finished sixth in Cy Young voting. Despite a charmed regular season, Rodón still had questions to answer in the playoffs after a disappointing postseason record to date. In his first outing, a must-win Game 2 of the Wild Card Series, he wasn’t his sharpest, allowing three runs in six innings and exiting in the seventh after beginning the frame with a walk and hit by pitch. Still, he battled to keep the Yankees in the game, avoiding the kind of noncompetitive start that could have ended his team’s season and soured his playoff resumé.

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New York won that game and the next one, giving Rodón at least one more opportunity to prove his playoff bona fides. What followed, sadly, was an unmitigated disaster. The starter who lasted at least 4.2 innings in each of his 32 regular-seasons starts got shelled by a ferocious Blue Jays lineup, matching his season high of six runs allowed before getting pulled after just 2.1 innings.

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The Yankees bailed him out, scoring runs against five consecutive pitchers to claw back a 9-6 victory and, once again, prevent Rodón from being the pitcher of record in a season-ending game. Still, after the team lost the next day, it was difficult to look back on Rodón’s final start of the season as anything but an abdication of all he had built through a season of consistent dominance.

Rodón had surgery after the season to remove loose bodies and shave down a bone spur in his left elbow, a procedure that’s expected to cause him to miss the start of the season, with a best-case scenario of him returning by early May. Still, with Cole and Schmidt also starting the year on the IL and Gil’s stock plummeting after a disappointing 2025, and with three years remaining on Rodón’s contract, expect the Yankees to once again count on their veteran southpaw as a centerpiece of their rotation this year in what will be his age-33 season.