Marcus Stroman has seen this story before.
He’s seen the strong opening acts to a season and what that can lead to — an All-Star Game invitation last year, for example — and then witnessed how quickly all of that progress can fade. He’s seen the highs of a pitching career when the ace label gets thrown around. He’s seen the opposite of that, too, when he’s simply a placeholder to fill a rotation’s fifth spot. In 2024, he was unofficially tasked with preventing that last part from shaping his current reality.
Last year at this time, Stroman’s ERA had dipped below 3.00. It dropped all the way to 2.28 after he tossed seven shutout innings against the Pirates on June 20. But that wasn’t sustainable. His post-Midsummer Classic timeline went like this: eight appearances, six starts, an 8.63 ERA, a hip injury, rib cage cartilage fracture and plenty of questions of where his next stop — given his expiring contract — would be.
So that’s why there was a degree of risk involved when Stroman signed a two-year deal, with a third-year vesting player option triggered if he logged 140 innings in 2024, with the Yankees in January.
