Thankfully, Carlos Rodon Looks Like a Different Pitcher in 2024

The Yankees have already won their fourth series in a row to start the season, they have the majors’ best record at 10-2, and it’s just the third time in franchise history they’ve won 10 of their first 12 games. Tuesday was certainly less enjoyable than Monday’s win over the moribund Marlins, but all the wins count the same, right? Down below in Pinstripe Past, I’m taking you back to that magical season of 1998, one that featured one of the wildest home openers the Yankees have ever played. Lets get to it.

April 9: Yankees 3, Marlins 2

Even before Gerrit Cole was sidelined by his sore arm, we knew Carlos Rodon was going to be a critical player for the Yankees.

After a disastrous 2023 season, his first year in pinstripes after signing a six-year, $162 million contract, Rodon was going to have to bounce back and be the pitcher the Yankees thought they were signing if they were going to make a serious run at the AL East title or at least a wild-card berth.

There were too many other question marks in the starting rotation, so Rodon needed to pitch at least closer to the way he did in 2021 with the White Sox and 2022 with the Giants when in both years he was an All-Star, received Cy Young votes, his ERA was a combined 2.67, his WHIP was 0.988, and his strikeouts per nine innings was 12.2 in 55 starts. Cole needed a wing man.

Now with Cole out until at least June, Rodon’s role has taken on even greater significance and three starts into the season, he has responded quite favorably to the added pressure. Tuesday night, he pitched six scoreless innings against the Marlins before running into trouble in the seventh, and Ian Hamilton and Clay Holmes got the game across the goal line as the Yankees won their fourth straight.

Rodon has long been primarily a fastball-slider pitcher, but this season he has been working on incorporating a changeup into his repertoire and against the Marlins he threw it 10 times among his 89 pitches. It followed a strategy the Yankees employed the night before with Nestor Cortes against the Marlins as they tried to take advantage of a Miami lineup that comes up swinging for every at bat.

“A lot of righties in the lineup that we thought that changeup would work well against, and today I had it,” Rodón said. “The profile was good and the location was good. Got some good swing and miss on it, and just hope to keep using that further on. A step in the right direction today. Just keep going. The confidence is growing, for sure.”

Both of the runs that were charged to Rodon in the seventh were unearned, so his ERA is now down to 1.72. He worked through significant traffic on the bases in his starts against the Astros and Diamondbacks which cut short both outings, but he limited them to three runs combined which showed some moxie that was clearly missing in 2023.

Tuesday he was sharp from the outset. He allowed a baserunner in four of the first six innings but never two at once. Twice a Marlin made it to third with two outs but Rodon escaped by striking out Emmanuel Rivera in the second and getting Tim Anderson on a groundout in the fourth.

“He’s in a really good space right now and he’s earned that,” Aaron Boone said. “Just three starts but good results, and it’s a result of a talented guy being prepared and ready.”

Here are my observations:

➤ The Yankees’ 10-2 start matches their best in franchise history through 12 games, a mark also accomplished in 1922, 1949 and 2003. In all three of those seasons they went to the World Series.

➤ Compared to Monday’s fun romp, this game was far less enjoyable. The Yankees had seven hits and drew seven walks but they were 2-for-10 with runners in scoring position. They had at least two men on base in five of the first six innings but had only three runs to show for it, and when Rodon ran into trouble in the seventh, it felt like all that RISP failure was going to burn them. Alas, these are the Marlins so it did not.

➤ Alex Verdugo hit his first Yankee Stadium home run as a Yankee, a towering shot to the short porch in the second. And then were was a bunch of hard contact by the Yankees, but Marlins starter A.J. Puk was living the good life. Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Volpe missed home runs by inches, and a few stingers were hit right at fielders so it stayed 1-0 until the fifth when it could have been at least 5-0.

➤ In that fifth, Juan Soto reached on an error, Aaron Judge walked and Giancarlo Stanton kept his little awakening rolling with an RBI double. Then in the sixth Jon Berti singled, Austin Wells walked, and with two outs, Soto came through with a big RBI single. Everytime Soto comes to the plate I just expect that he’s going to do something big. What a nice feeling that is.

➤ Rodon’s night ended in the seventh, partially his fault but more his defense’s fault. He walked leadoff man Josh Bell, and then Anthony Rizzo completely whiffed on a grounder and the error put men on first and second. Tim Anderson then hit a shot to third that Berti didn’t field cleanly and while he didn’t get charged with an error, it could have been.

➤ With the bases loaded and no outs, Ian Hamilton came in and got three straight outs, but two of Rodon’s runners scored. Look, it was a good job by Hamilton, but I always pay attention to inherited runners scored when I judge relievers. It’s a tough job, but when they’re called on in these tough situations, the role is to put out the fire. Hamilton did, but he allowed some fire damage because he wasn’t able to ring up a strikeout or two. Anyway, it didn’t matter because he pitched an easy eighth and Cardiac Clay Holmes gave us a stunningly easy seven-pitch 1-2-3 ninth.

➤ Tonight’s 7:05 finale is on Amazon Prime, which is irritating. Marcus Stroman goes for the Yankees against Ryan Weathers of Miami. Weathers is the son of former Yankees pitcher David Weathers who had very little success in parts of three seasons in the Bronx, but in the 1996 postseason was a stud as he threw 11 innings of relief and had a 0.82 ERA.

The Yankees’ Greatest Season Featured a Wild, Crazy 1998 Home Opener

NEW YORK (April 10, 1998) - What sometimes gets forgotten about the Yankees historic 1998 season when they won an MLB-record 125 games counting the playoffs is that Joe Torre’s team started that year on a seven-game West Coast swing which did not go well.

They dropped three of four to the Angels and A’s, then got thumped 8-0 in Seattle to fall to 1-4 and that prompted Torre - already feeling pressure from George Steinbrenner because the 1997 Yankees had the audacity to not defend their 1996 world championship - to call a team meeting in the hope that he could light a spark. And the usually mild-mannered and fatherly Torre didn’t use a match, he used a blow torch.

In the book The Yankee Years, written by Torre with Tom Verducci, Torre recalled that meeting this way: “That day when I spoke to them, I basically told them how I felt and how bad they were and how pissed I was. I pretty much went through everything with them. We were playing horseshit.”

No one could really argue with the manager. They had been outscored 36-15 in the first five games, their offense was stagnant with a cumulative .209 batting average, the pitching was terrible, and the mood in the clubhouse was darker than an Edgar Allan Poe piece of prose.

“Joe Torre got pissed,” David Wells told Buster Olney on his podcast a few years back. “We had a team meeting. Not too many guys were happy with it, but it was a great motivating speech. What happened after that really solidified that season and struck a nerve with a lot of guys. And we went on a rampage.”

Did they ever, and that night, after Torre scolded them for the way they had played and told them to buck up and get their heads out of their asses, the Yankees responded with a 13-7 thrashing of the Mariners, followed by a series-clinching 4-3 victory that sent the Yankees home feeling a little better heading into their home opener on April 10 against the A’s.

What happened that day at Yankee Stadium in front of a sellout crowd of 56,717 - largest for a regular-season game since the place had been remodeled in the mid-70s - probably wasn’t what Torre had in mind in terms of how he wanted his team to play, but at least it ended in victory, a crazy football-score 17-13 game.

In fact, David Cone even made a crack about that following his truly terrible performance which saw him allow nine earned runs on 11 hits and three walks in less than five innings which helped put the Yankees in an early 5-0 hole before their own bats exploded.

“Giants 17, Raiders 13,” Cone said, referencing the two NFL teams from the respective New York and Oakland markets. “I’m just real happy that we won the game because it makes it a lot easier to laugh and smile.”

It was the highest-scoring game ever played in the Bronx, breaking the old record of 28 combined runs set on June 3, 1933 when the Yankees beat an earlier iteration of the A’s, the men of Connie Mack from Philadelphia. The 17 Yankee runs were the most they had scored in a home opener since 1955 when they pummeled the Senators 19-1, the 13 runs allowed were the most in a home opener since a 13-2 loss to the Tigers in 1983.

Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio - 83 years old and throwing out the first pitch for what would be the final time as he passed away in the spring of 1999 - threw a strike to catcher Joe Girardi and as it turned out, that was arguably the best pitching performance of the day. A combined 10 pitchers followed DiMaggio to the mound, five for each team, and they allowed 30 runs on 32 hits and 18 walks while striking out only eight.

To kickoff what became a four-hour, six-minute marathon, the fans watched a scoreless first inning before the fireworks started in earnest when Oakland scored five times off Cone in the second as Ben Grieve and Matt Stairs delivered two-run hits.

From there, the Yankees scored the next 12 runs - two in the second and five each in the third and fourth innings - off A’s starter Jimmy Haynes and relievers Aaron Small and Jim Dougherty.

Tino Martinez hit a three-run homer that tied the score at 5-5 in the third, and Scott Brosius and Girardi capped that inning with RBI singles. In the fourth, Small loaded the bases with three walks before Daryl Strawberry hit a two-run double and Brosius hit a two-run single as the Yankees stretched their lead to 12-5.

Whatever security the Yankees felt as they began the top of the fifth was shattered over the next 30 minutes as the A’s sent 13 men to the plate and scored eight times on eight hits, a hit batsman and an error against Cone and relievers Darren Holmes and Mike Buddie as they grabbed an improbable 13-12 lead.

“I was amazed,” Girardi said of the A’s rally. “I thought we’d be able to stop them at 12-6, then 12-7, then 12-8 but they just kept going.”

For Cone, it was simply shocking how poorly he had pitched in his first two starts, both against the A’s - a combined 16 earned runs in 9.2 innings which worked out to a 14.90 ERA.

“There’s not much I can say; I’ve just been awful,” he said. “Physically I’m fine. There’s no excuses. The team gives me leads and I give them right back. If we had lost this game I would have been the most miserable guy on earth.”

But they did not lose because in the bottom of the fifth, the Yankees got right back to their own marauding ways with four runs to regain a 16-13 lead. The first five men reached base against Dougherty with Martinez driving in two with a double, Strawberry plating one with a single, and Chuck Knoblauch capping it with an RBI single.

And from there, things finally settled down and the only other run that was scored came when Chad Curtis singled, stole second and trotted home on Girardi’s single in the seventh.

“It was not a pretty thing to watch from either side,” said Oakland Manager Art Howe, whose pitchers walked 12 men. “There’s no defense against it, and 10 of them scored. There’s nothing his teammates can do, either. The pitcher is out there struggling to throw the ball in the zone and you can’t help him in any way.”

“We’re not there yet, we haven’t reached our potential pitching-wise,” Torre said after watching his staff’s ERA rise to 7.56 on the young season. “But we have the offense to go toe-to-toe with people and we’re going to have to outscore some people from time to time but you don’t want to get into a habit of having to do that. Hopefully our pitching will come around and I think it will.”

Steinbrenner would have been singing a different tune had the Yankees not won, but he seemed satisfied with the day because of the entertainment value it delivered. “I like this kind of team,” he said. “From a theatrical standpoint, I’d rather the curtain came down when we had the (12-5) lead, but no pitcher can get through this lineup with regularity, and our pitching will come around like it always has. You’ll never be able to count this team out.”

This victory was part of what became an eight-game win streak, and part of a run where the Yankees went 16-2 to close out April with a 17-6 record and a half-game lead in the AL East. And by the time their second eight-game win streak of the year was stopped on May 9, the Yankees were two games up in the division and proceeded to run away with what became a 22-game cushion over the Red Sox by season’s end.

⚾ April 9, 1965: The Yankees were the first opponent of the newly-named Houston Astros in their new home, the Astrodome. The teams played an exhibition which served as the inaugural indoor game in baseball history. The Yankees lost 2-1 in 12 innings, but Mickey Mantle - batting in the leadoff spot - recorded the first hit and home run in the building in front of 47,876 fans. His sixth-inning bomb was witnessed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

⚾ April 10, 1976: The Yankees rallied to defeat the Brewers 9-7 by scoring five runs in the top of the ninth at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, the big hits being a two-run double by Chris Chambliss, followed immediately by an RBI triple by Lou Piniella. However, there was still more work to do. In the bottom of the ninth the Brewers loaded the bases against Sparky Lyle and after he was lifted for Dave Pagan, outfielder Don Money hit what appeared to be a walk-off grand slam. However, manager Billy Martin came out to argue that first base umpire Jim McKean had called timeout just before the pitch was delivered. McKean denied it at first but eventually admitted he had, in fact, signaled for time, wiping out Money’s homer. Money then flied out, and after George Scott drove in a run, Ken Brett relieved Pagan and got Darrell Porter on a groundout to end the game.

⚾ April 13, 1978: Carrying over his streak from Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, Reggie Jackson homered in his first at bat of 1978, a three-run shot that keyed a 4-2 Opening Day victory over the White Sox. The game was then delayed several minutes as fans rained Reggie! candy bars onto the field. The candy had been distributed free to fans as they entered Yankee Stadium. Before all that, during a pre-game ceremony, Roger Maris made his first appearance at Yankee Stadium since his trade to the Cardinals following the 1966 season. He was invited back to help Mickey Mantle hoist the team’s 1977 World Series banner.