Alexander Wilson
The opening series against San Francisco went about as well as a team could hope for. The New York Yankees held the Giants to one earned run over three games, swept the series, and left Oracle Park looking like exactly the kind of team that can compete for a championship even while Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon are working their way back from injury. Now comes Monday in Seattle, and with it, a different kind of test.
Ryan Weathers gets the ball against the Mariners, and the conversation around him entering this start is a study in how to read pitching metrics correctly. His spring ERA was 8.83 over 17.1 innings, which is the number that will lead most people to the wrong conclusion. His strikeout rate went up. His walk rate came down. His ground ball rate was 57.1%, which would have been the best mark of his career by a noticeable margin if it had come during the regular season.
The contact he allowed was soft contact. The runs he gave up were the product of timing and location errors that tend to self-correct with more reps, not structural problems in his delivery or his stuff.
What Weathers Actually Brings
The fastball is real. He averaged 96.8 mph on it last season and his full profile shows a pitcher with the kind of velocity that keeps hitters uncomfortable regardless of what comes next in a sequence. During spring he touched triple digits, which is not something you see from a left-handed starter very often.
The Yankees absolutely noticed that, and it is a significant part of why they believe there is a genuine breakout waiting inside this 26-year-old arm.
The ground ball rate deserves more attention than it gets in the Weathers conversation. A pitcher who keeps the ball on the ground, limits walks, and generates whiffs is a pitcher who does not need a perfect defense behind him to survive. Those three traits together create a profile that should outperform its surface ERA in most circumstances, which is exactly what happened to Weathers at various stretches last season before injuries interrupted his momentum.
The injuries are the honest concern. He has never cleared 100 innings in a season. His career high is 94.2, set back in 2021. A pitcher with his ceiling should be running 170 innings per year by now, and the fact that he is not is entirely about durability rather than talent. The Yankees managed him carefully through spring and will continue doing so through April, which is sensible. You cannot use a pitcher who breaks down in June.
The Matchup
Seattle comes in having dropped two of three to Cleveland, so they will be looking to reset and find their footing at home against a Yankees team that is already playing with confidence. The Mariners are built around pitching and defense, which means this game could turn on a few key at-bats in the middle innings rather than a blowout either way.
Weathers has the profile to handle a Mariners lineup that does not give away many free bases. If the ground ball rate holds, if the fastball plays the way it did in March, and if Aaron Boone manages his pitch count with the care the situation requires, the Yankees have a real chance to carry the momentum from San Francisco straight through to the Pacific Northwest.
The rotation depth that has carried the first three games now hands the ball to its most unpredictable arm. Monday will tell us a lot.
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