The Yankees acquired right-handed reliever Angel Chivilli from the Colorado Rockies on Tuesday morning in exchange for first baseman prospect T.J. Rumfield, YES Network’s Jack Curry reported.
On the surface, this move is easy to pass off as another subpar arm unlikely to see meaningful time on the mound in the Bronx. Chivilli finished the 2025 season with the highest ERA among qualified MLB relievers at 7.06, while struggling to miss bats in the thin air of Coors Field and failing to hold leads for a Rockies bullpen that ranked second-to-last in the league in ERA.
Yet, Chivilli is not the type of pitcher the Yankees acquire by accident. In recent years, New York has made a habit of targeting arms whose surface-level results mask underlying traits such as velocity, extension, and movement profiles that its pitching infrastructure, governed by pitching coach Matt Blake, believes it can unlock.
The first element of interest in Chivilli’s profile is his arsenal. The 23-year-old righty has relied on just a three-pitch mix in his first two big league seasons — a fastball, changeup, and slider. His average fastball velocity of 97.1 mph was good for 88th percentile among MLB arms in 2025. Despite the lively velocity, pitching in Colorado didn’t help Chivilli’s fastball miss many bats, as with its minimal movement, hitters teed off for a .366 average against the pitch. His off-speed offerings, however, are likely what caught the Yankees’ eyes.
Chivilli’s changeup — thrown about 37% of the time in 2025 — garners a unique “rising” movement profile — dropping considerably less than league average changeups — which led to elite swing-and-miss numbers. Opposing hitters whiffed at the pitch at a 42.6% clip, and hit for an expected batting average (XBA) of just .204.
The righty’s slider was even better in those two metrics, generating a 45.5% whiff rate and an XBA of .202. However, the pitch did not “slide” how the usual slider would — even darting for arm-side movement on some offerings. Instead, Chivilli’s slider generated 4.1 inches of induced vertical break, and hitters chased the pitch 37.6% of the time. If Blake can unlock horizontal movement on the pitch, Chivilli could possess some of the best off-speed weapons in the Yankees’ bullpen, and in all of baseball.
Chivilli’s profile — a pitcher with elite underlying traits whose surface results don’t tell the full story — isn’t at all new to the Yankees. It mirrors the way New York unlocked Yerry De los Santos, another right-handed reliever who subtly became a useful piece in 2025 despite far from elite results on the surface.
The Yankees acquired De los Santos in the 2023 offseason on a minor league deal, and after spending the 2024 season at AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, De los Santos finished 2025 with a 3.28 ERA in 35 2/3 innings, striking out 28, and posting a WHIP of 1.51 — just 0.4 off Chivilli’s career mark of 1.55. Rather than overpowering hitters, De los Santos generated an elite ground-ball rate (GB%) paired with an above-average ability to limit hard contact, traits that allowed him to serve as a reliable multi-inning option for New York.
Chivilli’s GB% in 2025 sat at 49.8, good for 84th percentile across MLB. If New York feeds into his elite ability to keep hitters on the ground, Chivilli will see substantially better results in 2026.
The two righties’ motions even slightly mirror each other:
The key point in this move is simple: the Yankees do not need Chivilli to be elite. The high-leverage spots in New York’s bullpen are already solidified. If Chivilli can simply replicate the role De los Santos filled in 2025 — a ground-ball specialist and multi-inning option who keeps the ball in the yard — the move becomes an easy win for the Yankees.
If Chivilli takes just a moderate step forward under Matt Blake — refining his fastball and slider, leaning further into his ground-ball numbers, and letting his elite off-speed play in a more forgiving environment than Coors Field — he doesn’t need to be “fixed” to be valuable.
If the Yankees can turn a pitcher with Chivilli’s raw traits into another De los Santos-type contributor, their 2026 bullpen suddenly gets even stronger and far more intriguing.
The Yankee Office 
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