2025 SPs to Watch: Will Warren

The last SP I'm highlighting for the 2025 season, after a delay.

Introduction

After a disastrous 2024 debut, Will Warren is poised to be a major contributor to the Yankees' rotation in 2025 after a rash of injuries. He offers a deep mix with a focus on crazy outlier movement similar to Dustin May, notwithstanding his lack of 98 mph heat, and the typical sweeper emphasis of numerous Yankee starting products. The main concerns with Warren are if the mix can work with the large gaps his outlier pitches create, particularly against LHB where his sweeper won’t be nearly as effective, and if he can get his fastball variations to be consistently effective. In 2024, his sinker was a serious sore spot for him, and his 4-seam shape isn’t particularly original in any regard.

Pitch Mix

A common theme for Will is improvement in induced vertical break (IVB) figures across the board, most notably on his 4-seam, which gained 1.5 inches with the same arm angle. IVB considers vertical movement outside of gravity, and while it often runs hot early in the year before dropping off by the mid-summer months, it indicates that the worst-case scenario is what we got last season, which was passable, albeit in the realm of the dreaded dead zone. The 2025 offering provides an above-average approach angle relative to release height on above-average extension, pushing it towards calmer waters. With just 30% usage, the pitch should be safe so long as it doesn’t spring an IVB leak.

As mentioned in the intro, his sinker is a critical component of his operation. In its limited usage in the majors in 2024, it had a Wheeler-esque 50% chase rate vs RHB and had an equally absurd 40% CSW. The pitch did get clobbered, but that felt like a sequencing and sample issue more than a shape one; the pitch was reminiscent of Paul Skenes’ splinker and Tanner Houck’s dominant sinker with the amount of depth it managed. This season, it pushed its vert up 2 inches, which seems like a curious decision that separates it from the other unicorn sinkers in a negative way. It also gained 3 inches of run to bring it back towards distinctive territory, but the results simply haven’t been there. It continues to get killed, and the chase rate is now in the bin, down nearly 28% year over year. He’s also throwing it much more backdoor, and inadvertent or not, it’s just not working. Given the great responsibilities it’s given against RHB (>45% usage!) it simply has to be better.

The sweeper is his real money pitch, dancing 19 inches toward the glove side in Spring Training at just shy of 3000 RPM. It’s a plus pitch at worst when factoring in its crazy-hard velocity - 82 mph - and may even be double-plus. Its one issue is his hard-hit rate, which may be a consequence of 29 inches of separation from the rest of his Spring Training arsenal aside from his new, sweepy curve. The ideal contact rate (ICR) on the pitch is higher than last year, a difficult feat considering it was 50% then, and it isn’t returning the swing-and-miss to justify the damage. The sinker/sweeper combination garners groundballs at a minimum, but the contact is so hard off the bat that it doesn't even matter.

Then comes the changeup, which lost several inches of carry to create a more unique pocket for itself on the arm side. Before, changeups and sinkers were virtually overlapping with the crazy depth the sinker generated, but their respective changes have made them several inches apart on both axes. While he demonstrated slightly less dogmatic use of it in the Spring, that hasn’t carried over to the regular season. He’s best equipped to beat RHB with his typical sinker/sweeper combination, but a mixed-in changeup could help disguise the sinker more in on the hands. Against LHB, it’s underperformed, but that feels like a sampling issue more than a skill one. The zone rate is 25% with few whiffs despite some strong arm-side location.

Lastly, his new 80 mph curve has benefitted him greatly vs LHB. His arsenal in that platoon matchup is all four-seam, sweeper, and changeup otherwise, and it creates a nice movement middle ground to generate some whiffs at low risk.

Warren has ditched his cutter from 2024 for a new curveball, leaving a critical vacancy in the middle of his pitch plot. Graphic courtesy of TJStats’ Pitching Summary.

Conclusion

I feel like I’ve been quite negative throughout the article, so it’s worth mentioning that his last start against Cleveland was his best yet. Against a lineup saturated with left-handed and switch hitters, he was able to steal lots of strikes with sweepers on the outer half and below the zone, and his curve and changeup did their job adequately. He still got hit pretty hard, though, and the changeup didn’t do a great job generating swings and misses despite fairly low usage. Not to mention, he didn’t use a single sinker in the entire game! Talk about a hard-line approach. If things go wrong, it’s difficult for him to adjust (see: his game against the Rays).

Overall, I’m confident that he needs that cutter back to fully unlock his potential. Gerrit Cole abandoned his, only to bring it back at the proper time of need with great results. A 10% usage cutter could dramatically bolster him at the moment, and the shape was super unique (in part because of only 20 pitches registered). Its 0 inches of vert on 4.5 inches of run could be a serious aid on an island in the middle of his Cartesian pitch plane.

My prediction was more pessimistic than I imagined when researching this. At present, it feels like an ERA of 4.00-4.25 long-term because he lacks a true overpowering pitch to take over on his best days or bail him out when he’s on his B or C game. He’s often compared to Michael King, but I think King has the advantage in pitch shapes, command, and depth of mix. That is to say, Warren is the incredibly discounted version of King. The individual pieces are there for an ERA closer to 3.75, though, with a satisfactory resolution to his LHB situation (reintroducing a cutter or incorporating more curves, for example).

That does it for SPs to Watch. Apologies for the delay in posting this. Now that the series is done, the floodgates will open for different types of articles. I’m excited.

Sources

PitcherList

Alex Chamberlain’s Pitch Leaderboard

FanGraphs

TJStats' Pitcher Summary/Spring Training Pitch Dashboard