We’ve talked a lot about how good the 2021 Yankees’ pitching staff was, and indeed, it carried a lot of the freight in a year when the lineup was awfully disappointing. The whole squad was fourth in fWAR and K-BB% across all of MLB, and lest you think this was just the strength of a great bullpen, the starters were sixth and fifth in baseball in those metrics respectively.
The one thing the Yankee rotation wasn’t elite at, merely okay, was cumulative innings count. 12th in baseball at 829.1 IP, the rotation was a solid example of elite performance in a modest sample, compared with a team like Houston that paired lesser performance — almost two full wins less — over 60 more innings.