Ryan Garcia
While the Minnesota Twins don’t project to be a particularly good team, when the New York Yankees threw out Carlos Lagrange in relief they kept a good chunk of their starting lineup out there.
Trevor Larnach, Ryan Jeffers, Luke Keaschall, Eric Wagaman, Gio Urshela, Brooks Lee, Austin Martin, Alex Jackson, and Byron Buxton have all had MLB experience as recently as 2025.
He only allowed two runners to reach; one on a hit-by-pitch and another on a 32 MPH single as he struck out four batters and walked zero facing a quality group of bats.
The stuff was once again electric, but it’s not just the radar gun that Carlos Lagrange is lighting up inside the Yankees’ organization right now.
A 22-year-old who went from a little-known prospect to one of the best in the system, its his competitiveness and urgency that could help him take that next step in 2026.
Carlos Lagrange is ‘Built’ For the Pressure of Being a Yankees’ Phenom
When Aaron Judge speaks, his words carry more weight than your average MLB superstar, and the ringing endorsement of Carlos Lagrange is a message that many around the organization would agree with.
He noted that the Dominican-born righty could become a frontline starter for the Yankees, but he went out of his way to highlight how it was Lagrange’s demeanor that made him a prime candidate to pitch in New York.
Gary Phillips of the New York Daily News mentioned on Fireside Yankees’ The Bronx Beat how Yankees’ assisstant pitching coach Preston Claiborne was shocked with the initiative Carlos Lagrange showed after a rough 2024 season.
It was the unpolished prospect who told Claiborne that he wanted to work in Tampa on his own dime to improve his mechanics, and Gary made a fairly eye-opening statement on the latest Bronx Beat episode:
“Obviously the stuff is huge…but I kept hearing over and over again that his intangibles are really incredible. His leadership at just 22 years old is something that the Yankees have taken note of” – Gary Phillips on The Bronx Beat
Our full episode is linked above, and The Bronx Beat as a whole is full of incredibly insightful discourse from Gary, but makeup is clearly not the only thing that Lagrange brings to the table.
The hard work he put in after the 2024 season concluded paid off big-time; his four-seamer has added significant vertical movement and even added some velocity.
He’s got a power changeup and big sweeping slider now, pitches that he didn’t consistently throw during the previous MiLB season, weapons that have made him more of a candidate to remain in a rotation.
I’ve liked the direction he’s taken with his gyro slider, getting some more velocity on it to have it serve as a bridge pitch between the big sweeper and the power four-seamer.
This plot just baffles my mind; a pitcher sitting 100 MPH is pretty wild and while the 41-pitch outing cannot be weighed against outings that range from 80-100 pitches, it’s still a rare feat.
Unlike these outlier power fastball guys, Lagrange will often use his four-seamer under 50% of the time, trusting his secondaries to be effective out pitches and keeping hitters off-balance.
Pitchability can sometimes be conflated with command; while the two are correlated, at the end of the day there are some really good strike-throwers who a deep enough mix, and vice-versa.
Carlos Lagrange’s pitch mix is more complete than most power pitchers at this stage of their careers, he’s already embraced the direction the league has gone in respect to high fastball usage.
Hitters are more adjusted to velocity than ever before and Lagrange is able to speed them up and slow them down with distinct pitches that have excellent movement.
Whether he develops the command needed to live up to that frontline starter upside or not remains to be seen, but the Yankees should be thrilled with how far he’s come over the last year.
This is what happens when you take a physical outlier with a burn to improve and put them in an organization with the infastructure to make big skill leaps possible.
Sam Briend and Matt Blake have helped build a culture of innovation in the Yankees’ apparatus, and they might have their biggest developmental win yet if Carlos Lagrange puts it all together.
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