I’m going to be honest with you: when I saw the notification that the New York Yankees traded first base prospect T.J. Rumfield to the Rockies for Angel Chivilli, my first instinct was to check if my phone was bugging out.
On the surface, swapping a decent bat for a reliever with a 7.06 ERA and a 1.69 WHIP feels like Brian Cashman lost a bet. But after diving into the metrics, I’m changing my tune. This is exactly the kind of “dumpster dive” that pitching coach Matt Blake turns into gold, and I think they just stole a high-octane weapon for a prospect who had no path to the majors.
The Yankees clearly saw one thing when they scouted Chivilli: elite, unteachable velocity. The 23-year-old averages 97.1 mph on his heater, sitting in the 88th percentile for Fastball Velocity. In a world where velocity is king, you take a chance on that arm talent every single time, especially when the cost is a blocked minor league first baseman.
The Fastball Is a Liability, but the Secondaries Are Nuclear
Here is why the Rockies failed and why the Yankees might succeed: Chivilli throws his worst pitch way too often. In 2025, he relied on his four-seam fastball 45.9% of the time, and hitters absolutely feasted on it to the tune of a .366 average and a .585 slugging percentage. It’s straight, it’s loud, and despite the velocity, it gets crushed.
But look at what happens when he spins the ball. His secondary stuff is downright filthy. His changeup generated a massive 42.6% Whiff Rate while holding batters to a .225 average. His slider was even more ridiculous, boasting a 45.5% Whiff Rate.
We are talking about a guy with two pitches that miss bats at an elite clip, yet he spent nearly half his time throwing a fastball that gets hammered. That is a usage problem, not a talent problem.
The Matt Blake Blueprint: Pitch Backwards
The fix here seems almost too obvious. The Yankees rank in the 80th percentile for Whiff Rate as a staff because they emphasize “stuff” over “establishing the fastball.” I expect Blake to completely flip Chivilli’s script. If he drops the fastball usage to 30% and leans into that changeup-slider combination—which, by the way, also helped him land in the 84th percentile for Ground Ball Rate—he becomes a different pitcher overnight.
Chivilli is currently a Ferrari engine inside a beat-up Honda Civic. The raw power is there, the whiffs are there, but the chassis is rattling apart because he doesn’t know how to drive it. Rumfield was a safe, low-ceiling asset. Chivilli is a high-risk stick of dynamite. I’ll take the dynamite.