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Manager Aaron Boone of the New York Yankees

The New York Yankees pitching staff may be headlined by big-name free agent signings like 2023 Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole, 2025 19-game-winner Max Fried and former White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon. But the Yankees’ own pitcher development system continues to make significant contributions to the big league club as well.

Luis Gil, acquired in 2018 in a minor-league trade with the Minnesota Twins, emerged as the 2024 American League Rookie of the Year. Their 2017 first-round pick Clarke Schmidt became a reliable mid-rotation starter until an elbow injury halted his season this year.

Even a seventh-round selection from 2022, out of Boston’s Northeastern University, Cam Schlittler, burst into the Yankees starting rotation late this season, and went on to win the third and deciding game of the AL Wild Card Series against his hometown Red Sox.

Yankees Pitching Prospect Beats Signing Deadline

Yankees scouts continue to scour the globe for even more pitching prospects, and the latest one they found just signed his contract on Monday, the final day teams are allowed to sign international free agents — at least until the new signing period opens on Jan. 15.

According to the prospect’s own Instagram page, and confirmed by independent baseball journalist Francys Romero, who focuses his coverage on international players, 18-year-old Netherlands left-hander Tijn Fredrikze officially signed with the Yankees on Monday.

“At 18, several scouts believe he has a chance to develop his velocity (88–91 mph) and secondary pitches,” Romero reported, adding that the Yankees paid the Dutch southpaw a $90,000 signing bonus.

Fredrikze Led Dutch League in K Rate

Despite what seems by MLB standards to be rather modest velocity, the teenager pitched his first full season for Kinheim, a team based in Haarlem, North Holland, in the eight-team Dutch Major League this year. Throwing 60 innings over 13 games, including 12 starts, he notched 76 strikeouts.

That total was third-most in the DML, but more importantly, his strikeout rate of 11.4 per nine innings was the highest of any pitcher with more than 15 innings — in a league that saw the teenager competing against many players in their 20s and even 30s.

But Fredrikze apparently caught the eye of Yankees scouts even earlier. After pitching 18 1/3 innings as a 17-year-old, with 22 strikeouts, the legendary big league began taking an interest in him, at least according to the pitcher himself who told the Dutch sports publication Honkbal Softbal that he agreed to sign with the Yankees as early as April.

Impressed by Yankees Scouts Politeness

“They’d been following me for a while and really saw the progress I’d made,” he told reporter Emma Dijkstra in an interview published Monday. “They saw that I can get even better.”

Other MLB clubs also took an interest in him, the young southpaw told Dijkstra, but it was the professionalism of the New York organization that tipped the scales for him, he said.

“You often see clubs approach the player right away. The Yankees politely approached my parents first,” Fredrikze said. “That felt very professional. It really gave me the feeling that they were investing in me, not just as a player but also as a person.”

His $90,000 bonus represents about 1.4 percent of the Yankees’ total bonus pool money for 2025, and was made possible by the fact that at the trade deadline, New York dealt shortstop Oswald Peraza to the Los Angeles Angels for minor-league outfielder Wilberson De Pena plus $250,000 in international bonus pool cash.

Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin