Ryan Yarbrough

Ryan Yarbrough doesn't throw hard. He never has. The left-hander sits in the upper 80s, changes speeds, locates, and gets outs the old-fashioned way -- by making hitters beat themselves. The New York Yankees signed him for $2 million in 2025, and he gave them exactly what they paid for: 64 innings of reliable pitching from a guy who's done this for a long time.

Path to the Bronx

Yarbrough played at Old Dominion University, where the Mariners drafted him in the fourth round of the 2014 draft. Seattle traded him to Tampa Bay in 2017, and that's where everything clicked. The Rays were pioneering the opener strategy -- using a hard-throwing reliever for the first inning or two, then handing the ball to a "bulk" pitcher to eat innings. Yarbrough became one of the best bulk arms in baseball, going 16-6 as a rookie in 2018 and racking up nearly 450 innings across four seasons in Tampa.

After stints with the Royals (2023), Dodgers (2023-24), and Blue Jays (2024), Yarbrough signed a minor league deal with Toronto entering 2025 but opted out when he learned he wouldn't make the team. The Yankees jumped in with a one-year, $2 million contract, and he headed to the Bronx.

Yankees Career

Yarbrough appeared in 19 games for the 2025 Yankees -- eight starts and 11 relief appearances -- posting a 4.36 ERA with 55 strikeouts in 64 innings. As a starter, he was even better: 3-1 with a 3.83 ERA, allowing two runs or fewer in seven of his eight starts and one run or fewer in five of them. That's the kind of consistency a pitching staff needs from its depth arms.

Over parts of eight big league seasons, Yarbrough has gone 56-41 with a 4.22 ERA in 215 games. He's pitched for five organizations and always managed to find a role.

Key Moments

The Role

Yarbrough is the ultimate swing-man. He can start when someone gets hurt, come out of the pen for long relief, or throw three innings to bridge the gap between a short outing and the late-inning arms. He doesn't have a flashy pitch or overpowering velocity, but he knows how to pitch -- and on a staff with hard throwers like Gerrit Cole and Luis Gil, the change of pace is actually an asset.

The seven-of-eight starts where he allowed two runs or fewer didn't happen by accident. Yarbrough survives at the big league level because he understands sequencing better than most pitchers who throw ten miles an hour harder than he does. He'll show a hitter the same 87 mph fastball three times in a row, then drop a changeup in the low 80s that looks like it's arriving in slow motion. The hitter's timing is wrecked, and by the time he adjusts, Yarbrough has moved on to the cutter or the curveball. It's not exciting television, but it works -- and when you're the fourth or fifth starter on a contending team, "it works" is the only thing that matters.

There's a practical element to having a guy like Yarbrough on the roster, too. Every pitching staff deals with injuries, and when a starter goes down, the options are usually to call up a Triple-A arm who isn't ready or stretch out a reliever who doesn't want to be stretched. Yarbrough eliminates that problem. He's already stretched out, he's already proven he can handle a starter's workload, and he doesn't complain about going back to the bullpen when the regular guy comes off the IL. That kind of flexibility doesn't show up in WAR calculations, but every pitching coach in the league knows how valuable it is.

The Yankees liked what they saw enough to bring him back for 2026. That says everything.