It was the first night of the first Red Sox-Yankees matchup of 2025, and all was not well in the Boston dugout. Walker Buehler, one of Boston’s key additions in the offseason, had been, simply, shelled. A walk, a double, a three-run bomb, followed by a single and a two-run dinger. It was quite a difference from the last time Buehler had toed the rubber in the Bronx, where he pitched the final three outs of the Dodgers’ World Series clincher in 2024.
After the game, the pitcher was livid with himself, embarrassed by his two-inning, seven-run effort. Manager Alex Cora, more measured in his reflection, bemoaned how the short effort taxed his bullpen, but also offered a concise diagnosis and perception of the game, and how emblematic it was of the team’s frustrating first half.
“We prepare; we have to execute,” the Red Sox skipper told the Boston media after the game. “At the end of the day, it’s execution. It’s not the scouting reports, or they’re showing up late to their bullpen session or to warm up. It’s just that we aren’t executing.”
On the other side of Yankee Stadium, it was a different story. The starting pitcher is unlikely to be the focus on a night when the offense goes bananas. And Will Warren’s final line -- 5 1/3 innings, four earned runs -- wasn’t exactly the type to inspire fawning hosannas. Warren was excellent in the early going, but in the sixth, he left with the bases loaded; two of the runners would eventually score.
“Obviously lost the strike zone a little bit,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said afterward. He noted that it was a hot night and suggested that Warren might have been a bit tired. And he acknowledged the long layoffs between innings as the Yankees offense went wild -- no doubt a pitcher’s dream -- could have impacted Warren’s rhythm, as well. Either way, the manager was pleased. “Up to that point, he was really outstanding. Got us off on the right note, and we were able to hang on.”
Warren’s assessment, of the first five innings in particular, was pretty simple: “I think we executed really well,” the rookie said. It was no small thing, coming on the heels of arguably the highest-profile -- and almost certainly worst -- start of his short career. But as the young pitcher finds his footing, he is learning to follow the ultimate path to success. It’s a road that starts, of course, with skill and ability, the baseline for a playing career in professional baseball.
The separators, though -- the elements and attributes that Warren is chasing -- exist on a continuum. They run from confidence to trust to execution, and as the pitcher seeks to take advantage of the opportunities that exist around him, he’ll need to harness all three.
***
Every baseball player, whether stumbling around a tee-ball field or riding a bus to a Triple-A game, dreams of a big league debut. For some, it’s a realistic pursuit; for others, a laughable dream akin to vacationing on Saturn.
Warren’s debut was … pretty good. It came on July 30, 2024, in a game at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park. The right-hander, who had turned 25 a month earlier, pitched 5 1/3 innings, allowing four runs and striking out six while walking two (a line almost identical to what he posted against Boston this past June 6). Warren made five more appearances last season, and with the exception of one impressive outing against the White Sox on Aug. 14, there was little to be inspired by. When the players went their separate ways for the offseason, the pitcher was saddled with an 0-3 record and a ghastly 10.32 ERA.
Warren was an eighth-round pick out of Southeastern Louisiana University in 2021, and he had established himself as one of the team’s top prospects before his debut. But his first go-round with the big league club was another in a series of rough adjustments to a higher level, the type that the pitcher kept experiencing as he climbed the team’s organizational ladder. He would struggle to adapt, struggle with trusting his abilities.
“You know you belong here,” Warren says of the mentality. “But at the same time, Do I belong here?”
Preston Claiborne is in his first season as the Yankees’ assistant pitching coach, but he previously coached in the Minors and has known Warren since the pitcher joined the organization. Claiborne -- who pitched five seasons in the team’s system, including regular run in the big leagues from 2013 to ’14 -- recalls a similar challenge each time he moved up a level.
“There is something to settling in,” Claiborne says, adding that he allowed a run in nearly every one of his relief appearances over the first month that he pitched in Triple-A. He knows as well as anyone that when you take that last, biggest step, and when you’re suddenly on a mound in a triple-decked stadium with millions of fans watching on TV, the challenge gets even greater. Suddenly, failure isn’t a learning experience; it’s existential.
“Once you get to the big leagues and you realize you’re playing against the best competition in the world and you get punched in the mouth,” Claiborne says, “there always is that like, Wait a minute … do they have something on me? Or, Is my stuff not good enough?”
Claiborne took note of the attitude he saw Warren display early in Spring Training this season. A year ago, the pitcher had expected to break camp with the team after Gerrit Cole went down with an injury, but Luis Gil claimed the spot instead. And when he finally got his chance, Warren didn’t deliver. But rather than seeming cowed by having taken so many lumps in the Majors, he arrived in Tampa with a determination. “It was almost like he belonged,” Claiborne says.
Part of that was necessity; Gil went down with an injury early on, and right on the heels of that, Cole received a diagnosis that he required season-ending Tommy John surgery. The team needed arms, and Warren was ready to seize the opportunity. Pitching for the first time in the team’s fourth regular-season game, though, the Mississippi native showed the same signs that had plagued him 2024. Too many walks -- four in just five innings. He wasn’t hit particularly hard, but he just kept making things more difficult for himself. Finally, in his third start of the season (and the eighth of his big league career), Warren earned his first win. Over the next month-plus, he proved to be a perfectly reliable starter, occasionally excellent, especially during a five-game stretch from May 4 to May 25 in which he struck out at least seven batters in each game, with a high of 10 against Texas on May 20.
“I know what I’m capable of doing, and I didn’t do it in ’24,” Warren says. “So, just go back to work. Try to hone in on what makes Will Warren good and try to perfect that and get as good as possible at that strength.”
Which led him to the mound at Dodger Stadium on May 31 for a nationally televised Saturday night World Series rematch. This time, it all went wrong. Warren recorded just four outs, surrendering seven runs on six hits and four walks. There were glimpses of the pitcher who couldn’t adapt to the spotlight a year earlier, but Boone viewed it as a mere blip -- a bad game, the same that any pitcher will have from time to time.
Cole has always been an extra pitching coach in the dugout on days that he’s not on the mound, but as he endures a lengthy rehab, he makes an even greater effort to be present for the team’s hurlers. A former No. 1 overall Draft pick, Cole didn’t allow seven runs in a game until his 109th career start, but he has struggled like anyone else, and he long ago learned the most important lesson: You can’t let failure compromise your routine or your confidence.
“There’s two ways you can do it,” Cole says. “You can forget about it, flush it and get back to having confidence in your process. And the second way would be to use it as motivation. The younger you are, the less experience you have, I’d probably say you tend to lean more toward using it as motivation. The older you get, the more experience you have, the more you understand that, every once in a while, you’re going to have a bad game. You try not to let it stress you out for five days before you go back out.”
***
When it comes to confidence, few humans on the planet compare to Clarke Schmidt. Where some people try to project an aura, Schmidt’s is unwavering; it’s impossible to know if he just struck out the side or got lit up. And that’s no small part of his success.
It’s not just uncontrolled bravado; it’s the way that Schmidt uses his own internal belief to push himself. It’s a constant means of challenging himself to do the next thing, to do it better, to progress.
“It took a few years of being in this league,” Schmidt says, “and you start having some success with some good numbers, and you start getting guys out at a consistent level and maybe you start getting those bigger outs, and you start getting the José Ramírezes out more consistently, the Rafael Devers and these big-name guys. And then you’re just like, ‘OK, I can really compete at this level.’”
To Cole’s point, when it comes to the 29-year-old Schmidt, everything is motivation. He is, after all, still young, still proving himself. Which might be what makes him such an important teammate for a guy such as Warren.
It’s not that Warren lacks confidence. Over a 20-minute conversation, the pitcher repeatedly insists that he knows that he belongs in the Majors, that he knew it even when things weren’t going well, whether in 2024 or after the Dodger Stadium start. It’s just part of the process.
But when Schmidt was starting out and struggling to put lefties away, he knew the answer was right around the corner. When Warren struggled against southpaws, he admits that it led to some soul-searching. And on April 22, when the Guardians decided to attack Warren with a lineup entirely built of left-handers and switch-hitters, well, the pitcher had no choice but to take it as a direct challenge to use his four-seamer as a weapon. “I’m confident in what I’ve got,” Warren says. “So, it was like, You have all these weapons, let’s get ahead with the fastball and use our weapons to put them away. And, it kind of just flowed perfectly.”
The entire Yankees clubhouse thinks of itself as a family, but there’s no question that, at this stage in his career, Warren shares more in common with a Clarke Schmidt than he does with a baseball titan such as a Gerrit Cole. The Yankees’ ace can and does offer anything possible to help his young teammates thrive, but he’ll be the first to admit that his journey looks a lot less like Warren’s than Schmidt’s does.
“The emotions that he’s feeling are more similar sometimes to the fresher emotions that Clarke is feeling,” Cole says. Or, as Warren puts it, “We have a similar pitch package. And yeah, I get to ask him about, ‘What did you think here?’ Or, he’ll just flat out say, ‘I remember when I was in this spot, this is what I was thinking. Just go this direction.’” And it goes without saying that when Schmidt says, “When I was in this spot …” he’s talking about a year or two ago; for Cole, it could be a decade or longer.
For Warren, in good times and bad, the problem hasn’t been an overarching confidence. It has been a trust issue. He knew he was good enough to pitch in the big leagues, and he certainly knew that he was better than his numbers looked. But like Schmidt in the first stages of his own career, for a while, Warren insisted on nibbling around the zone rather than attacking. If the batters were hitting the ball, he reacted by trying to strike everyone out, essentially afraid of contact. Big league hitters are too good for that. And when you’re afraid of the strike zone, you start handing out some easy trots to first. Then you panic and leave a pitch middle-middle, and the umpire is reaching for a new ball while the batter jogs easily around the bases.
Confidence is incredibly valuable. It lets you overcome adversity. It gives you a foundation to build from. It lets you step onto a mound without falling to pieces. But it’s trust that allows you to execute. And for too long, Warren just didn’t trust his stuff.
***
A lot of it came into focus during a conversation with Cole. “Throw out the outcomes,” the veteran told Warren. “How are you executing?” It was a strange question; the answer was right there in the stats, no? This start was good. That start was bad. Warren probably executed well in this one and poorly in that one, no?
Not so fast, Cole told him. If you throw a fastball down the middle, the ace said, it’s a strike. But it’s not a well-executed pitch. As Claiborne says, execution is purely skill-based. “It’s the consistent ability to throw the ball where you want it. Get the ball to go where you want it to go and do what you want it to do. … You can’t control the batter swinging. You can’t control the atmosphere. You can’t control the umpire or what the umpire sees. But you can control what the ball does.”
Cole understands that players are judged by their wins and losses, but that’s outcome, not execution. The night before Warren got hit hard in Los Angeles, Max Fried took his first loss of the season. But Fried, Cole says, had a bad outcome, not a bad outing. Still, Cole says, “Ultimately, we’re driven by results. Those results are driven by good processes that run in the background.”
The stud pitcher had his fledgling teammate go through his pitches, start by start. The response Cole delivered was clear: Dude, are you really executing at the level that you should be executing at?
“Let’s throw away who’s hitting what and who’s scoring what, and let’s just look at, objectively, how many times you’re putting the ball in the area that you want to put the ball in,” Cole observed. “Because we could talk about one pitch driving in two or three runs, but the reason why those two or three runs came in is probably a lot of poor execution beforehand.”
A lot of it is similar to the struggle over the years to quantify defense. Before the newest stats were readily available, we thought of the great defenders as the ones who looked the best making plays, ignoring that a great diving catch could very easily mean that an outfielder took a bad route to a ball, or that an infielder who got to more balls would probably make more errors. As Cole says, trying to explain the difference between execution and outcome is a lot like the difference between two popular baseball websites, with execution being visible in FanGraphs stats and outcomes making up a player’s Baseball Reference page.
“You don’t win championships on FanGraphs stats,” Cole says. “You win championships on actual winning and outcomes, which is what Baseball Reference is a little bit more geared toward. But there can be false positives in results. So, using both as a tool, ultimately the job is to prevent runs. Period. How do we prevent runs? Well, we know that we need to put ourselves in a good position with the types of pitches that we’re throwing in order to give ourselves the best chance to prevent runs.”
A strike is, by definition, a pitch that’s thrown in a place where a batter can hit it and do damage. There are margins, obviously, and there are better and worse parts of the strike zone. But throwing a ball in that area -- or at least making the batter believe that you are throwing the ball in that area -- means trusting that your stuff is good enough. Warren doesn’t have triple-digit heat. He has a low- to mid-90s fastball and an impressive collection of breaking balls. So, he needs to deceive and to trust in the game plan that he and his catcher and coaches built before the game.
“There’s some crazy stat -- I don’t know it off the top of my head -- but it’s like MLB pitchers miss by an average of seven inches per pitch,” Warren says. “So, unless you’re Gerrit Cole, you’re not a robot. He can throw wherever he wants. But you can set your sights on, I have the most room for error on this outside part of the plate. So if I do miss, I’m still in a good spot. I can have success in that spot even if I don’t hit it perfectly. I can miss up and get a fly ball, or I can miss down, and he takes a strike. Or even if you throw it for a ball, you can successfully use that pitch to set something else up. And I think that’s why executing is top tier.”
***
There was another telling moment in the June 6 Boston game, a glimpse at the spectrum of a baseball career. When Marcelo Mayer got the Red Sox on the board with his first career homer, he probably didn’t expect to be pulled for a pinch-hitter later in the game. Such is life for a rookie.
“That’s a balance between developing the player and winning the game,” Cora told reporters afterward. “I don’t know if it’s going to be this season, but at one point in his career, we’re not going to pinch-hit for him. I made sure to let him know that because he’s very important in what we’re trying to accomplish. He’s part of the future, and he’s a good player.”
In 2024, a start like the one Warren had against the Dodgers probably would have meant that the pitcher would be brought in to chat with the manager afterward and delicately informed that he was being sent back to Triple-A. A year later, Warren is still finding his way, still learning to harness his confidence and trust his game plan and -- as a result -- execute his pitches. But even after a discouraging face-plant against the Dodgers, he wasn’t necessarily looking over his shoulder. Indeed, Boone was clear that he wasn’t worried about the pitcher, that he simply viewed it as what it was: one bad start.
Warren says he wouldn’t have expected that show of faith from his manager in 2024. “But I didn’t give him any reason to,” he says. “That’s why it was such a letdown, because I knew what I was capable of. I think it’s a difference in mentality and being comfortable.
“Bad ones are going to happen. It’ll be all right. Now we’re in a spot where we can just say, ‘Oh, we’ll move past that one.’”
Claiborne says that he has been wowed by Warren’s growth this year. But some things are out of a player’s control; often, it’s just about timing. A pitcher with a bright future needs to pitch in order to realize that potential. Cole more than almost anyone understands why it can be hard in New York. A lifelong Yankees fan, the ace knows that there are no nights off in the Bronx. The team seeks to win the World Series every year, which means that every game feels like a must-win. Maybe a pitcher for a different franchise gets a chance to take his lumps at the big league level, with a calculus that short-term pain could pay off in the long run. The Yankees rarely offer that luxury.
But Warren got the chance at redemption six days after that Los Angeles loss. No big deal, just your everyday outing against the Boston Red Sox. Go get ’em, kid. The final pitching line might have looked pedestrian. But the execution was outstanding. Unlike in the Dodgers game, when Los Angeles batters refused to chase any of his nibbles and instead forced him into the middle of the plate, Warren attacked the Red Sox.
“He’s the one who applied the pressure,” Claiborne says. “And honestly, he just filled up the zone. He showed that he was the aggressor. And then he got guys to go after pitches that he wanted them to.”
It’s a model for Warren to follow as he continues navigating his rookie season. Through that Red Sox start, his Baseball Reference page still left plenty to be desired. A 4-3 record with a 5.34 ERA doesn’t exactly scream All-Star. But the FanGraphs side shows a more effective pitcher, and helps project the faith that Boone, Claiborne and Warren’s teammates keep professing. It’s a matter of trust for the right-hander, of believing that the combination of skill and work and confidence will lead to greater execution.
“I don’t think I’m scared of contact or anything like that anymore,” Warren says. “Sometimes last year, it was like, All right, they’ve hit the ball a couple times. I don’t want them to hit it anymore. It’s a real hard game to play if you’re going up there trying to strike everybody out. Especially in this league. So, this year, it’s like, All right, if you’re going to put up weak contact early in the count, then have at it. I’ve got eight dudes behind me that are going to play phenomenal defense. I think that’s been the difference because then you look up, and you’ve got them 0-2. Well, let’s take a chance at our strikeout now. You have them on their heels, and I’m the aggressor, and I think that’s a recipe for success.”
Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the July 2025 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.