The Yankees defeated reliever Mark Leiter Jr. in an arbitration hearing, Jon Heyman of the New York Post reports. Leiter will earn $2.05MM for the 2025 season, rather than the $2.5MM salary he was looking to land.
New York picked Leiter up from the Cubs at the trade deadline, and the right-hander posted a 4.98 ERA over 21 2/3 innings in the pinstripes over the rest of the regular season. Overall, Leiter finished the 2024 campaign with a 4.50 ERA in 58 combined innings with Chicago and New York, along with a very strong 33.6% strikeout rate and some of the best chase and whiff rates of any pitcher in baseball.
Beyond the big strikeout numbers and a 46.2% grounder rate, however, Leiter had a below-average 8.6% walk rate, and his homer rate spiked after the trade to the Bronx. On the plus side, Leiter got on track for the Yankees during their playoff run, delivering a 1.69 ERA over 5 1/3 innings across six appearances in the ALCS and World Series.
Leiter turns 34 next month, but he is only in his second trip through the arbitration process due to the late-breaking nature of his MLB career. The righty didn’t make his big league debut until age 26, and it wasn’t until his age-31 season with the Cubs that Leiter started to emerge as a solid bullpen arm. Leiter has earned 43 holds over the last two seasons, but since arbitration panels generally favor saves as the primary counting stat when gauging reliever salaries, it perhaps isn’t surprising that this panel ruled in the Yankees’ favor.
MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz predicted a $2.1MM salary for Leiter in 2025, so the right-hander’s final salary clocks in just slightly below that projection. The Yankees’ control over Leiter runs through the 2026 campaign, and today’s decision officially closes the book on all of the Bombers’ arbitration business for the offseason.
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