Heading into their Wednesday game hosting the Kansas City Royals, the New York Yankees sat atop the American League East with a 10-7 record — though they led by just nine percentage points over the 11-8 Toronto Blue Jays. But the success that the defending American League champs have enjoyed so far in the 2025 season has been nearly all thanks to their elite offensive attack.
The Yankees entered the day scoring 6.06 runs per game, best in the AL and second only to the 6.1 scored by the Chicago Cubs. Though after the Cubs tallied only a pair in their game against the San Diego Padres, their per-game average dropped to 5.9, leaving the Yankees as the most productive offense in Major League Baseball.
Measuring the Yankees offense by the metric OPS+ — which converts the on-base plus slugging percentages to a number that compares a team’s OPS to the league average, which is fixed at 100 — the Yankees had easily the top hitting attack coming into Wednesday. Their number of 138 indicates that the Yankees OPS has been 38 percent better than MLB average. The second place team, the Cubs, posted an OPS+ number of 125.
Yankees Injury-Riddled Pitching Gets Some News
But the injury-riddled Yankees pitching staff is another story completely. The staff ERA+ (a number that adjusts ERA along similar principles as its OPS counterpart) stood at 97 — below league average, and good enough only for 19th out of the 30 MLB teams.
Outside of their big offseason free agent catch, former Atlanta Braves lefty Max Fried — whose 3-0 record and 1.88 ERA has been the only redemptive aspect of Yankees pitching this year — the Bronx Bombers starting pitchers have bombed big time. None of the other four members of the starting rotation has managed an early-season ERA under 5.14.
The Yankees got some good news, at least potentially, with the return of Clarke Schmidt after a series of injuries. In his first start of 2025, Wednesday against the Royals, Schmidt lasted 5 2/3 innings, allowing three runs on four hits. With Schmidt intended to be plugged in as the No. 5 starter on the Yankees’ staff, the team had to be happy with that performance.
And Then Came the Bad News
But with the Yankees missing ace Gerrit Cole for the season due to Tommy John surgery, as well as No. 3 starter Luis Gil — the 2024 AL Rookie of the Year — Schmidt will need to assume the third slot in the rotation and the higher expectations that come with it.
And on the same day that they got good news about Schmidt, the Yankees were hit with new bad news about Gil. The 26-year-old Dominican Republic native has been recovering from a right lat muscle strain, but on Wednesday when he was scheduled to begin his throwing program, the first major step in his recovery, Gil was shut down again.
Earlier in the week, the Yankees had ordered new medical imaging on Gil’s lat muscle and when they checked the results, the images showed that Gil’s muscle is not healing at the rate doctors had expected.
“It’s just the level of healing,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone before Wednesday’s game. “It’s got to get to, I don’t know, 80 percent. When they start, there are checkmarks of when you start the throwing program.”
The Yankees now expect that Gil will get his throwing program underway in about 10 days.
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Yankees Get More Bad News on Pitching Staff Despite Return of Injured Starter