NY Yankees Covering the Bases: Luke Weaver, Aaron Judge, and Gerrit Cole's injury rehab (2024)

It’s been a pretty nice week for the New York Yankees, who are 6-0 since the last edition of this digest and head into their finale with the Minnesota Twins looking for a second straight series sweep before a trio of nationally televised games versus the Los Angeles Dodgers at Yankee Stadium this weekend. Aaron Judge and Luis Gil continue to tear through the competition, Gerrit Cole is one step closer to returning to the rotation and even Gleyber Torres is showing signs of improvement.

Catch up on those stories and all things Yankees from the past week below, as delivered by our national and beat writers.

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Power rankings: New York Yankees are No. 1

The Yankees’ impressive play vaulted them to the top of our latest MLB Power Rankings, where this week’s topic was potential first-time All-Star candidates around the league.

Record: 42-19 (as of Tuesday morning)
Last Power Ranking: 2

First-time All-Star candidate: RHP Luis Gil

Do the Yankees miss Gerrit Cole? Of course. He’s Gerrit Cole. But if you merely looked at the standings, you wouldn’t notice his absence. Part of the reason is Gil, a 26-year-old with an electric arm and results to match. His changeup can make hitters look befuddled. His strikeout rates have been admirable. With Gil dealing, the Yankees starting rotation has remained a strength, even with Cole, widely considered the best pitcher in the sport, nursing an elbow injury. The group will be even stronger when he returns. And if Gil stays healthy, he’ll be in the mix for major assignments in October. — Andy McCullough

The latest hits

ICYMI, our national writers weighed in with what they are hearing and seeing.

1. How many All-Stars will the Yankees get?

MLB All-Star voting kicked off Wednesday and Jim Bowden got an early start in projecting which players should fill out the 32 roster spots for each league. Four Yankees would be on his team at the moment. Here’s his case for one of two would-be first-time All-Stars in shortstop Anthony Volpe.

Anthony Volpe, Yankees
(2.6 WAR, 6 HR, 43 R, 11 SB, 124 OPS+)
Volpe has made significant changes to his swing and approach at the plate, raising his on-base percentage from .283 last year to .350 this year. He has six homers and 11 stolen bases. It’s going to be tough for Volpe to make the AL squad because of Henderson, Witt and Seager, but I found a way to put him on the team by carrying only two catchers.

2. Clarke Schmidt’s evolving arsenal

Eno Sarris looked at five pitchers who are changing up their arsenals and could be in for better days. One of those hurlers was Yankees starter Clarke Schmidt. Here’s what Sarris had to say.

In May, the Yankees starter has added both depth and cut to his cutter without costing himself any velocity. That doubled the whiff rate on the pitch to lefties and gave him a real higher-velocity weapon against southpaws for the first time.

It’s been particularly effective at the top of the zone against lefties, which opens up the bottom of the zone for his curveball, which in turn leaves the door open for back-door sweepers like this one.

That’s three different things to worry about, and if the batter seems too comfortable on any of these pitches, Schmidt has been throwing a high sinker that looks like the high cutter until it leaves the strike zone up and away. All in all, that’s a package that can work against lefties, who have hit .282/.362/.457 against Schmidt for his career and caused him fits until now. This May, lefties have hit .218/.267/.291 against him, by far the best month of his career as a starter in that category. Against Minnesota this month, all eight of his strikeout victims were left-handed.

Against righties, he has his sinker and sweeper as foundational pieces, and he can play the rest of his arsenal off of their horizontal dominance. That’s how he’s risen to the top 15 among qualified starters in strikeouts-minus-walks, which will quickly be a new normal for him if this approach continues to work. From these seats, it looks like it will. He just went on the injured list with a lat strain but might be worth holding at this level of quality.

3. Keith Law’s top 50 MLB prospects (after the first two months of the season)

There’s only one Yankee who made this updated in-season list, but Jasson Domínguez managed to move up eight spots from his preseason ranking despite being injured for the start of the season. Here’s Law’s reasoning.

Domínguez is back playing rehab games in Double-A Somerset after undergoing Tommy John surgery in September, and so far he looks like the same electric, high-upside hitter he was when he reached the majors last year, well ahead of schedule. The Yankees aren’t in the same offensive straits right now that they were in last year, though, so they can afford to take it easy on him, and perhaps option him to Triple A once the rehab assignment ends.

Viral moment of the week

464 feet for Aaron Judge's 21st home run! pic.twitter.com/ha1Oo2hBnu

— MLB (@MLB) June 2, 2024

This monster shot on Saturday in San Francisco, which gave Judge an MLB-leading 21 home runs, tied for the fifth-longest home run in the big leagues this season. Two of the bombs higher on the list — a 467-foot blast against the Twins at Target Field on May 15 and a league-leading 473-foot wallop (tied with Mike Trout) versus the Astros on May 9 — are also courtesy of Judge.

Baseball beat

Our beat writers Brendan Kuty and Chris Kirschner picked out what you need to know.

1. Gerrit Cole aces first rehab start

Brendan Kuty headed over to Bridgewater, N.J., to watch the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner’s first rehab start of the season at Double-A Somerset on Tuesday. It went well, as Cole threw 3 1/3 scoreless innings with four strikeouts against the Hartford Yard Goats. The most important news for Yankees fans? Cole said he was “definitely close” when asked how far he was from returning to the big-league club.

2. Spencer Jones’ rough beginning

Cole wasn’t the only player worth watching in Somerset. Kuty also watched 2022 first-round pick Spencer Jones, who has been struggling through his first 40 games in Double A after a fantastic showing in spring. Read more about Jones and some other Yankees prospects here.

3. Yankees’ All-Star possibilities

Earlier, we noted Jim Bowden’s early projection of four Yankee All-Stars next month. In this story, Kuty looked at the cases for eight individual Yankee players. Seems like Judge and Juan Soto have a pretty decent chance.

Did you catch this?

Luke Weaver has been a fantastic comeback story for the Yankees this season, going from a guy who was DFA’d twice in a month last season to one of 2024’s best relievers. Chris Kirschner dug into the process of how Weaver got there. Here’s an excerpt:

“I haven’t really ever talked about this besides with close family,” Weaver said. “There was that moment where the Cincinnati DFA happened. I just felt like I was going out there and pitching and doing things I needed to do and the results were never really falling for me. It just felt like there were a lot of adjustments, a lot of mental strength that I was trying to push through and that just felt like a really low point.

“In the moment, that was a point where I was actually asking those questions in my mind of like, ‘Is this it?’ And I just remember taking a good night’s sleep and waking up and just feeling resurged and just being like, ‘That’s not who I am. That’s not the way I think.’ I think I had a moment of vulnerability, a moment of reflection and just letting emotions out.”

A few days after being released by the Reds, the Seattle Mariners signed Weaver. He pitched just five games for them before they DFA’d him, too. After getting DFA’d twice in a month, Weaver drew interest from the New York Yankees. It was mid-September and the Yankees were playing for nothing. They cycled in numerous pitchers and prospects to see who could stick around for 2024. Weaver started three games for the Yankees and pitched just 13 1/3 innings but finished with a 3.38 ERA and 16 strikeouts.

“The way the season ended and the positivity that came with it was just a very out-of-body experience for me,” Weaver said. “I felt that this was very much a higher power than just playing a game. There’s a purpose. There’s a circle of life that goes through this.”

The Yankees eliminated Weaver’s slider, reduced his curveball usage and increased his cutter usage in his three starts. What they saw in those three outings was enough for them to re-sign Weaver for $2 million in the offseason, plus a team option for $2.5 million in 2025. The contract looks like a steal so far. Weaver has thrown the second-most innings for all MLB relievers and ranks in the top quartile for all pitchers in whiff, strikeout, chase and walk rates.

Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said the organization was initially interested in Weaver last season because of his pedigree as a former top prospect involved in the Cardinals–Arizona Diamondbacks trade of Paul Goldschmidt. They also saw some traits in his delivery and in the profiles of some of his pitches that they thought they could alter. The Yankees helped take Weaver’s fastball last season from an 88 Stuff+, a metric that grades the physical characteristics of a pitch, to a 133 Stuff+ this season. His changeup rose from an 83 Stuff+ grade to a 109 this year.

In Year 9 of Weaver’s career, the Yankees figured out that he could be a trusted high-leverage reliever for a team with the second-best bullpen ERA in MLB.

“All of our best acquisitions, seemingly, have been when the scouting department, the pro scouting department, our front office and our analytics department kind of sees qualities on all sides, like pro scouting sees a good athlete with a good delivery and a track record of throwing strikes,” Blake said. “The analytics sees some underlying spin traits that maybe we can adapt and move around. The two combined together, and obviously the character from Luke shows up in house. All these things held together. But I do think when it’s really clicking and collaborative, we all kind of have a piece of the pie. I think that’s what’s helped us.”

Field notes

And now, a quick word from the comments section.

In case you missed the Yankees’ six early trade candidates buried under a 28-year old movie reference earlier this week, here’s that story. And while he wouldn’t be allowed on the Yankees due to the team’s longstanding facial hair policy, Grizzly Adams DID have a beard.

(Top photo of Luke Weaver: Luke Hales / Getty Images)