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yankees still have a big void in their rotation with fewer than three full days until the new year. As Estevo explained earlier this week, the uncertainty surrounding Carlos Rodón and Nestor Cortes following their injury-plagued and unproductive seasons in 2023, and Clarke Schmidt after nearly tripling his previous season’s innings, puts the starting staff in a difficult position. After missing out on Yoshinobu Yamamoto and a handful of other elite free agency starters, New York’s options for external reinforcement are becoming increasingly limited.

James Paxton, an old acquaintance of Estevo’s, was offered as a possible way to at least rebuild depth.

2023 stats: 19 starts, 96 innings pitched, 4.50 ERA (101 ERA+), 4.68 FIP, 3.98 xFIP, 24.6 percent K%, 8.0 percent BB%, and 1.0 fWAR.

FanGraphs Depth Charts Projections for 2024: 26 starts, 142 innings pitched, 4.02 ERA, 4.15 FIP, 24.4 percent K%, 8.2 percent BB%, 2.3 fWAR

Previous Contract: Signed a two-year, $10 million deal with the Red Sox before the start of the 2022 season.

When the Yankees sent a transaction that included top pitching prospect Justus Sheffield to the Mariners after the 2018 season, they hoped to get an MLB-proven ace in Paxton to lead a rotation during the Baby Bomber era. In his first season in pinstripes, he went 15-6 with a 3.82 ERA, 3.86 FIP, and 3.5 fWAR in 29 starts totaling 150.2 innings. In the playoffs, he pitched to a 3.46 ERA in three starts, including a season-saving masterpiece against the Astros in ALCS Game 5, giving up one run on four hits with nine strikeouts in six innings.

Paxton established himself as one of the league’s top starters in the latter half of the 2010s, ranking tenth in FIP (3.20), eleventh in K-BB% (21.7), and nineteenth in fWAR (15.5) among qualifying starting pitchers between 2016 and 2021. He did it while throwing the 14th-hardest fastball (96 mph) of that group, the fastest of any lefty starter during that time period.

Of course, the Big Maple is no longer that pitcher, with injuries limiting him to just one appearance of 1.1 innings between 2021 and 2022. Yankees fans will recall that back surgery delayed the start of his 2020 season, while Tommy John surgery cost him the whole 2022 season. Injuries prevented the southpaw from fully realizing his potential throughout his career, having never made 30 starts nor qualified for an ERA title (162 innings) in any of his 10 big league seasons. He’s thrown a grand total of 117.2 innings since the end of 2019, pitching to a 4.90 ERA and 4.60 FIP during that span.

While Paxton isn’t the type of pitcher you’d want to pencil into the rotation for a full season’s worth of starts, he showed signs last season that he still has gas in the tank. After beginning the season on the disabled list with a hamstring strain, Paxton exploded with the Red Sox, pitching to a 2.73 ERA with 64 strikeouts in 56 innings across his first 10 appearances, en route to capturing AL Pitcher of the Month honors in June.

The lefty even maintained this effectiveness into the second-half, with a 3.34 ERA across 16 starts totaling 86.1 innings. Unfortunately, Paxton began to lose steam after the Trade Deadline and appeared completely exhausted in his final three appearances, allowing 17 runs (16 earned) in 9.2 innings (14.90 ERA), walking more than he struck out to lower his overall numbers for the season.

From the end of July to the end of the regular season, his pitch velocity and movement deteriorated, and his results decreased as a result. Batters were not only making a lot more contact, but they were also doing a lot more damage, with metrics like exit velocity, hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and xwOBA rising by the end of August.

Paxton is not someone I would feel comfortable starting every fifth game for an entire season, barring an offseason training plan that helps him regain his stamina. However, this does not exclude him from adding value to his next team. The Yankees’ starting pitching depth was nearly completely decimated by trades for Juan Soto, Trent Grisham, and Alex Verdugo, as well as departures in the Rule 5 Draft, as we’ve chronicled on the site in recent weeks. Paxton is the kind of low-cost, high-potential depth you’d want to stash if any of the five projected starters were to lose time due to injury, allowing him to stay fresh and so pitch at optimum effectiveness if his name was called.