In the upcoming weeks, the Yankees’ attention will be firmly turned toward fixing a starting rotation that finished in the bottom-half of the league in almost every pitching category. While they are connected to several of the names at the top of the market, I also expect the team to scour the lower tiers of starters in an attempt to raise a floor that fell out from underneath the team last season. Among the ranks of these pitchers, the names that has surfaced the most in rumors is Frankie Montas.
2023 Statistics: one game, 1.1 IP, 0.00 ERA, 4.01 FIP, 4.01 xFIP, 14.3 percent K%, 14.3 percent BB%, 0.0 fWAR
2024 FanGraphs Depth Charts Projections: 24 starts, 137 IP, 4.08 ERA, 4.16 FIP, 22.4 percent K%, 7.5 percent BB%, 1.9 fWAR
Previous Contract: Earned $7.5 million in third and final year of arbitration eligibility.
Given his injury-riddled last couple of seasons, it’s easy to forget that Montas was positioning himself as one of the better starters in the league while with the A’s. In his first four seasons as a starting pitcher in Oakland (2018-2021), Montas placed in the top-30 in ERA (3.58), FIP (3.55), and home runs per nine (0.97) among qualified starters. This started with a four-seamer with 90th-percentile velocity and 80th-percentile ride, followed by a pair of nasty offspeed pitches in the splitter and slider that allowed him to induce ground balls at greater than a 43 percent clip in 2018, 2019, and 2021.
Unfortunately for him and the Yankees, things couldn’t not have gone much differently after his move from the Bay Area to the Bronx. He made only eight mostly ineffective starts for the team before ending the season on the IL with shoulder inflammation that also cost him time on the shelf in Oakland and ultimately required offseason surgery that robbed him of all but one appearance in 2023. That the Yankees knew he was injured at the time of the trade pushes the swap into the running for one of the worst trades of Brian Cashman’s tenure, though this is no fault of the pitcher.
