Looking at Ryan Yarbrough

by Andrew Hefner

June 6, 2025

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Ryan Yarbrough has quickly become one of the standout members of the Yankees organization this year, especially with the absences of Gerrit Cole, Luis Gil, and more. After not making the Blue Jays' opening-day roster, he was picked up by the Yankees and has quickly made big adjustments that have made him unhittable in the Bronx.

Let’s take a look at some stats, patterns, and more that help show Ryan Yarbrough’s rise to dominance for New York. 

The Cutter

Since the start of his career in 2018, Yarbrough has frequently had his cutter as one of his main weapons on the mound, however, its usage has dropped in recent seasons. At its height, Yarbrough used his cutter 40.1% of the time during the 2021 season, though that usage percentage quickly dropped to just 9.9% in 2024. The reason? The batting average against his cutter rose from .224 in 2019, to .314 and .324 in 2022 and 2021, respectively, all while having the slugging against the cutter jump to .750 in 2024, and .580 in 2021. 

A Fangraphs article from 2019 highlights Yarbrough’s “path” to the cutter, with Ryan himself saying, “I talked to a couple guys in the [Rays] organization, and began working on it. The cutter started developing. After a while, using it all through Triple-A, and then last year in the big leagues, it’s become a pretty big weapon for me. With how my fastball runs, it helps keep hitters honest.” (Similarly, I found another quite ironic article from 2017, appropriately titled Rays’ Ryan Yarbrough Should Consider Adding Cutter to Arsenal by SBNation.)

Despite recent struggles, though, the cutter is once again the face of Yarbrough’s arsenal, with the usage back up to 24.4%, the most of any pitch in his current arsenal. His cutter is being used “high and outside” when facing right batters, more than any other location, and batters have just a  .226 average when facing the pitch. 

Swing and a Miss 

Yarbrough has certainly become a type of pitcher like no other in the league this year. His release tricks, and slow speed in a time of flamethrowing and powerful starting pitchers have undoubtedly had batters on the edge all season, especially when a juicy 79 mph changeup is coming towards them. These batters get so excited to see a ball pitched that slowly… that they whiff over an incredible 46% of the time. That’s the 33rd-best whiff rate of any pitch by any pitcher in all of baseball this season, and it is eighth among all pitches in hard hit percentage with just 10.5% of all of his changeups hit having an EV of over 95 mph. 

Similarly, the whiff rate of his sweeper is also above 41%, and hitters have an average exit velocity of just 75 mph, the second lowest of any pitch he has ever thrown in his career. 

King of the Soft-Contact

A relatively new stat, barrel percentage, has quickly become a highly important stat to hitters, but also to pitchers looking to excel in a soft-contact pitching style. Now in 2025, it's safe to say that Yarbrough is the king of this stat on the pitching side. He is in the 94th percentile in barrel percentage for pitchers as just 3.6% of pitches hit off of him were “barreled”. Numbers-wise, that is just four barrels on 664 pitches thrown this season. 

On top of his impressive barrel percentage, he is a perfect 99th percentile in average exit velocity, and as I mentioned earlier, his changeup and sweeper have propelled him into being the top pitcher in that category. 84.1 mph is his average exit velocity in 2025, which is just 0.7 mph slower than his previous low in 2021. 

Quite obviously from the two stats I already shared, he is also 98th percentile in hard-hit percentage (hard hit is measured as the number of pitches hit above 95 mph). Just 27% of the pitches hit this season were above that threshold.

Fastball No More

The final, and arguably most interesting part of Yarbrough’s pitch arsenal this season, especially in this day and age, is what seems to be the end of his fastball. As you can maybe tell from these stats that I have shared (and by just watching him pitch), Yarbrough is not a hard thrower, and his average fastball speed has never been faster than 88.2 mph, a benchmark that he set way back in 2018. With the rise of his cutter, and newfound comfort in changeups and sweepers over the last few seasons, his fastball usage has quickly dropped from 30.4% in 2023 to 9.3% this season, the seventh lowest in baseball. When thrown, though, he has a 24.4% put-away percentage, and batters are only hitting .111 against it, likely due to the limited sample size (If you were interested as well, he is in the very first percentile in terms of average fastball velocity).

Final Thoughts 

I enjoy taking the time to look at these more nuanced stats, especially when I have more time now that school is over! If you love baseball (which I assume you do if you are reading this), I highly recommend checking out your favorite Yankee’s Baseball Savant page and look through some of the incredible stats MLB has collected. Yarbrough has one of the most interesting collections of stats I have seen, so if you want, please go more in-depth into him! His debut against the Red Sox is sure to be a fun one!