Michael Pineda

Michael Pineda pitched four seasons for the New York Yankees from 2014 to 2017, and somehow the strikeout-to-neck-smear ratio of his tenure still feels about right. He came over from Seattle in one of the more lopsided trades in recent franchise history, lost two full years to a shoulder that betrayed him before he ever threw a Yankees pitch, and then got ejected from a game in Boston for wearing pine tar on his neck like it was a fashion choice. In between all that, he was legitimately good -- good enough to set a franchise strikeout-rate record that had stood since the Clinton administration.

The Trade That Sent Montero Away

Brian Cashman agreed to the deal on January 13, 2012, pending physicals: the Yankees sent catcher Jesus Montero and pitcher Hector Noesi to Seattle for Pineda and minor-league arm Jose Campos. Montero had just hit .328 with four homers in a 69-plate-appearance September call-up and looked like the next great Yankees bat. Pineda had just made the 2011 All-Star team as a 22-year-old rookie, going 9-10 with a 3.74 ERA and 173 strikeouts in 173 innings for the Mariners -- an 8-6, 3.03 ERA first half earned him the All-Star nod as an injury replacement for Justin Verlander, and he finished fifth in AL Rookie of the Year voting. Two young, controllable, cost-effective assets swapped for each other. On paper it was the kind of trade that could go either way.

It didn't go either way. It went one way, fast (Montero never developed into a real everyday player, and Pineda would go on to outproduce him by a wide margin in bWAR before either team ever cashed in on the upside they thought they were buying).

Two Years of Nothing

Then the shoulder blew up before Pineda ever threw a pitch in pinstripes. He reported soreness in spring training 2012, an MRI turned up a torn labrum, and he had surgery on May 1, 2012, with a roughly 12-month recovery timeline attached to it. That timeline didn't hold. Pineda didn't pitch in a single big-league game in 2012. He didn't pitch in a single big-league game in 2013, either.

Two full seasons, gone, for a guy the Yankees had traded a legitimate prospect bat to acquire. (If you want to know why front offices get nervous about pitching prospects, this is Exhibit A.)

The Comeback, and Then the Neck

Pineda finally showed up in spring training 2014 looking like his old self -- 15 innings, a 1.20 ERA, 16 strikeouts against a single walk -- and won the fifth spot in Joe Girardi's rotation outright. His Yankees debut came April 5, 2014, against Toronto: six innings, one run, five strikeouts. Two years of rehab, and the stuff was still there.

Four starts into that comeback, Pineda was dealing -- a 1.83 ERA and 15 strikeouts against just 3 walks over 19.2 innings, one of the best rate lines in the sport that spring. Then a strained teres major muscle -- not the shoulder again, thankfully, but close enough to make everyone hold their breath -- shut him down in late April and kept him out until August. He came back and made nine more starts down the stretch, finishing the year at 5-5 with a 1.89 ERA over 76.1 innings across those 13 total starts, one of the best rate lines in the sport, in barely half a season's worth of work. He'd finish the year having thrown fewer than 80 innings for a team that badly needed a healthy Pineda for a full season. He never quite got one.

The Pine Tar Games

Here's the part everybody remembers regardless of what else Pineda did in pinstripes. On April 10, 2014, he started against Boston at the Stadium with a visible smudge of pine tar on his pitching hand. Red Sox broadcasters and reporters noticed it. Boston didn't formally contest it that night, and the smudge wasn't there by the time anyone looked twice. Nothing happened.

Thirteen days later, at Fenway, Pineda did it again -- except this time the smudge was on his neck, in plain view from the visiting dugout. Red Sox manager John Farrell told plate umpire Gerry Davis he could see it clearly. Davis checked after the second inning and tossed Pineda right there on the mound. Boston won the game 5-1. Major League Baseball suspended Pineda 10 games the next day.

Girardi backed him publicly ("I don't think he's trying to do anything to cheat, I think he's trying to just go out there and compete"), which was probably true and also completely beside the point -- you can't be that obvious about it and expect a division rival to look the other way twice. Pineda apologized, took the suspension, and came back. It's still the first thing a lot of Yankees fans think of when his name comes up, which isn't entirely fair to the pitcher underneath the pine tar, but that's baseball's unwritten-rules theater for you.

The Strikeout Years

Once the suspension faded, Pineda settled into a real run as a mid-rotation strikeout arm, even if the win totals never quite matched the stuff. In 2015 he went 12-10 with a 4.37 ERA, and on Mother's Day that May he struck out 16 Orioles without issuing a single walk over seven innings -- the first pitcher to do that since Johan Santana in 2007, and it set a Yankees franchise record for strikeouts without a walk in a single game.

2016 was the strangest season of his Yankees career. Pineda finished 6-12 with an ugly 4.82 ERA and gave up 27 home runs -- and also struck out 207 batters, the first 200-strikeout season of his career, at a 10.61 K/9 rate that led the American League and broke David Cone's 1997 franchise mark of 10.25 for a qualified starter. A pitcher can miss that many bats and still lose 12 games. Pineda proved it (the home run rate did him in more than the strikeout rate ever helped him). He shared that rotation with CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka, and on any given fifth day, Pineda's fastball-slider combo could look like the best stuff of the three.

2017 looked like the best version of him yet. He opened the year with the kind of start you dream about -- 7.2 innings, 11 strikeouts, no walks, retiring the first 20 Tampa Bay hitters he faced before Evan Longoria broke it up with a double -- in an 8-1 home-opener win. He was 8-4 with a 4.39 ERA through his final start in early July. Then the elbow gave out. A partial UCL tear, confirmed by a second opinion from Cincinnati Reds team physician Dr. Timothy Kremchek, sent him to Tommy John surgery on July 18, 2017. He never threw another pitch for the Yankees.

Pineda signed a two-year deal with the Twins that December while still rehabbing the elbow, missed all of 2018 recovering, and came back in 2019 -- only to run into a 60-game suspension for a diuretic that MLB flags as a possible steroid-masking agent. It wasn't a clean ending anywhere he went, honestly. But strip away the neck goo and the lost years, and what's left in the Bronx portion of the ledger is a pitcher who, when healthy, could miss more bats than almost anyone in franchise history for a stretch of two years. The shoulder and the elbow just never let him stack enough of those stretches together.