The Yankees have found themselves in the Devinth circle of hell with their closer, and there is currently no way out.
Manager Aaron Boone was forced to make the difficult call to give the ball to Devin Williams for the eighth inning of a scoreless game on Tuesday night against the Texas Rangers, just one night after he blew a save in the ninth inning in what turned into an 8-5 loss and seemingly lost his closer job once again.
But after Will Warren trudged through five innings, Camilo Doval and Luke Weaver ate the sixth and seventh frames. Three of the four Rangers to lead off the eighth were righties, and Boone went to Williams rather than the recently reinstated from the IL Mark Leiter or southpaw Tim Hill.
David Bednar, who was available, was likely being held for a save opportunity.
It backfired.
After getting Marcus Semien to ground out to lead off the inning, Williams yielded a double to Adolis Garcia, then walked Joc Pederson and Wyatt Langford to load the bases.
Rowdy Tellez made him pay, singling to center to score a pair in what ultimately was the game-deciding hit in a Rangers 2-0 win.
“I mean, I don’t really know what to say at this point,” Williams said. “Continue to work, keep trying to execute and help the team any way that I can.”
Williams has scarcely been helping, though. He is now 3-4 with a 5.44 ERA in his first season with the Yankees, which is nearly triple his career 1.83 ERA in his first six MLB seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers.
He has put up a scoreless appearance just twice in his last eight appearances since the All-Star break, to which he has a 9.39 ERA.
In total, he has allowed 26 earned runs this season, which is identical to the number of runs he yielded across three seasons, from 2022 to 2024, with the Brewers.
“Hopefully, we’ll help him turn the corner and get part of the group that we feel like can still be very good down there,” Boone said.
But there is not much to feel good about at all lately, especially in the bullpen. While the Yankees have now gone 18-29 in their last 47 games, the bullpen, which they added to at the trade deadline, has not taken much of a step in the right direction. In fact, one of those new acquisitions, Jake Bird, was optioned to Triple-A after allowing Josh Jung’s walk-off home run on Monday night.
Williams is running out of runway to get meaningful innings with roughly seven weeks to go in the regular season, though maybe it is well past the point of his getting such opportunities.
