“June Swoon” is the phrase currently making its way through the discourse surrounding the Yankees. It makes sense. The offense — the top offense prior to the past two weeks — has been struggling. A seven game lead in the division has been whittled down to 2.5. Making this stretch of poor play even more frustrating is that the starting pitching has been excellent.
In particular, Clarke Schmidt and Will Warren have both been spectacular. Schmidt just completed his third straight game of at least six innings with zero earned runs to bring his season ERA down to 2.84. Warren has pitched well recently, pitching 18 innings of 2.50 ERA ball in his last three games. While Max Fried and Carlos Rodón have both turned heads with their performances for different reasons, Schmidt and Warren’s performances both require some shine of their own.
Warren notched his career high in strikeouts with 11 in his start against the Angels on June 17th. While the Yankees were mired in the midst of a lengthy scoring drought and ultimately lost that game 4-0, it must have been nice for Warren to see some tangible results align more with his expected, underlying metrics. Since May 1st, Warren is top-five in the majors with a 2.33 FIP as compared with a 4.21 ERA in the same time frame. He leads the majors with 12.27 K/9 in that frame as well. He’s not giving up many homers either, giving up just .53 HR/9 since the beginning of May.
May 1st is right around the time he started throwing his fastball 36.5 percent of the time instead of 33.8. It’s been that fastball which has seen the most success. He’s throwing it far more than last year — 39.1 percent as opposed to 30.6 percent in 2024. The results have been nothing less than fantastic so far. Batters are hitting just .182 against it with a .291 slugging and 28.1 percent whiff. Compare that to, say, Paul Skenes’ fastball, against which batters are hitting .185, slugging .315, and whiffing 27.1 percent of the time. Warren’s fastball has garnered a 10 Run Value and has been the foundation for his strong 29.4 percent strikeout rate.
Warren is not a complete pitcher yet — he will need to continue to hone his slider and stop falling behind in counts, a key culprit in his high walk rate. Still, given Warren’s underlying statistics along with a positive regression towards the mean vis-à-vis actual results, his recent run of form is nothing but a positive.
Ironically, Schmidt was found success in almost the complete opposite way. Schmidt’s breaking stuff has quite literally been some of the best in baseball. Generally speaking, Schmidt throws his curve to lefties and sweeper to righties. Batters are hitting .125 and slugging a pathetic .161 against his curve, while he commands a .105 BAA and .134 slugging percentage against the sweeper. In his last start, batters were faring .000 against all pitches into the eighth.
His newfound success with the curve has helped him battle lefties, who he struggled against earlier in his career. Lefties hit just .198 against him, compared to .238 in 2024 and .303 in 2023. Since the beginning of May, when he eschewed his sweeper in favor of the curve and slider, Schmidt has a 2.94 FIP, which places him in the top 20 in the majors. Schmidt is a fly ball pitcher, and in a stadium like Yankee Stadium, that pitching profile is always suspect for a pitching slump. However, he’s posting his lowest HR/9 of his career, and has mostly succeeded in limiting hard contact — an area he’s improved upon since last year.
Warren and Clarke have been so good it can change the Yankees’ calculus at the deadline. Warren’s swing-and-miss stuff would look great in the bullpen, and Schmidt’s transformation into a frontline starter provides some guarantees for a returning Luis Gil. Still, the Yankee bats need to wake up and take advantage of this starting pitching. While I think Warren and Schmidt’s success is no fluke, there’s only so many opportunities you can waste in this game before it really comes back to bite you.
