Carlos Rodon is a tough pitcher to evaluate, and after a solid second season with the New York Yankees, he struggled in his playoff debut in the Bronx. Things started about as good as they could, with three strikeouts to start the game and a pumped-up New York crowd feeding off of Rodon’s emotions. Then, the fourth inning came around and the Royals threw up four runs, knocking the left-hander out and leaving the crowd stunned as to how someone could go from dominating the top of Kansas City’s lineup to getting smacked around the ballpark.
It isn’t clear whether Rodon will get the ball in Game 1 of the ALCS or not, but the Yankees will most certainly start him for one of these games at the very least. After a dominant second half, Rodon looked poised to step up in October, but if he wants to wipe away his first start, he’ll have to lean on his newfound changeup more often in critical situations.
Can Carlos Rodon Change Things Up and Help the Yankees Win the Pennant?
Right-handed batters have bedeviled Carlos Rodon this season, with a .454 SLG% and .330 wOBA against him on the season. For context, Giancarlo Stanton posted a .330 wOBA, the average RHB is 2024 Stanton against Rodon at the plate, and there are a few reasons for that. His four-seamer and curveball are firmly below-average pitches against RHBs as they’ve crushed those two offerings, and even his slider which has great results against RHBs has a negative Run Value in those situations.
The one pitch that has served as a complete buzzsaw against righties is his changeup, a pitch that Rodon has refined a ton in 2024. You could argue his changeup catalyzed his post-ASB surge, as he dialed up the usage of it in August and September and rode it to a guaranteed spot in the postseason rotation.
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Left-handed batters are seeing the fastball-slider diet that Carlos Rodon is infamous for, and he’s dominant in those matchups. What I’d like to see is a shift in his changeup usage against right-handed batters as it has become one of the best offspeed pitches in the game. His 129 Stuff+ on that changeup was the third-best for any qualified starter in baseball, as it’s not only nearly 10 MPH slower than his fastball, but there’s also over 14 inches of vertical separation.
A flaw with Stuff+ is that it doesn’t factor in command, which matters when we talk about relying more on a pitch, especially in a postseason environment. It’s not enough to possess an elite pitch, you have to be able to locate it in areas where you can consistently miss bats and limit damage contact, but Rodon’s changeup command is pretty strong.
When Rodon misses, it’s typically out of the zone, where batters might still chase and either make ugly contact or come up empty. Furthermore, we can look at result-based metrics to figure out whether a pitcher has strong command of a pitch as well since it reflects well on a pitcher’s ability to execute that specific offering. Swinging Strike% is an excellent metric to evaluate how often a pitch is executed properly, and Carlos Rodon’s changeup stacks up with some of baseball’s best:
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The top four being left-handed starters would make sense considering that changeups are best against opposite-handed batters, and the majority of MLB hitters are right-handed. Carlos Rodon can miss a ton of bats with his changeup, and it’s imperative that the Yankees find a way to get him more comfortable with that offering. In that same pool of pitchers, Rodon is ninth out of 93 pitchers in xwOBA (.222), and considering the aforementioned problems that Carlos Rodon has had with right-handed batters, it would behoove him to throw it more often in those scenarios.
It’s hard to ask a pitcher to become someone different from who they have been their entire career, but I think we’d see better results from Carlos Rodon if he embraced his changeup as the go-to weapon against righties. Tarik Skubal was a fastball-slider pitcher in 2021 and 2022, but the decision to become a fastball-changeup guy in 2023 and 2024 elevated him to a Cy Young pitcher. Going into the ALCS, it will be important for Rodon to take in information from his Game 2 start and apply it to what could be a huge Game 1 start if he gets the ball.
This is exactly what the Yankees paid Carlos Rodon for; and while he hasn’t gotten it done for most of his tenure in the Bronx, he can change that narrative in October. His first test was a failure, but if Rodon relies on his changeup a bit more in this upcoming start, he could get out of the situations he failed to get out of in the fourth inning against KC.