Bryan Hoch's 1:49 a.m. split — 6.57 ERA over Will Warren's last eight starts vs. 3.22 over his first twelve — put numbers to what the Yankees rotation card already said. He wasn't on it Monday morning.

Will Warren took the mound at Citizens Bank Park on Sunday and lasted three innings — six earned runs, six hits, one homer, in a game the Yankees lost 11-4 to the Phillies (MLB, July 26). It was the punctuation on a second-half collapse that Yankees beat reporter Bryan Hoch put into numbers at 1:49 a.m. Monday: 6.57 ERA over Warren's last eight starts (27 ER in 37 IP), against a 7-1 record and a 3.22 ERA over his first twelve.

The math tells the story. The rotation card is blunter. When the Yankees flew home from Philly Sunday night and posted their week for the White Sox series, the lineup read Fried (Monday), Cole (Tuesday), Schlittler (Wednesday), Weathers (Thursday). Warren's name isn't on it.

Baseball-Reference's 2026 line for Warren — 4.41 ERA across 102 innings, 95 ERA+ — still looks passable on the surface, sustained almost entirely by that first-half stretch where he was the rotation's most reliable arm. The split unmasks it. The pitcher who went 7-1 from April through mid-May is not the one who has been taking the ball since.

Three days before Sunday's implosion, Warren threw 16 pitches in relief against Pittsburgh and ran his sinker up to 95.2 mph — nearly two ticks above his 93.3 average as a starter. At the time, that velocity gap was the argument for keeping a bullpen option in-house ahead of the Aug. 3 deadline. Now the argument is settled: the Yankees haven't moved him to the bullpen so much as they've already moved on. The rotation card confirmed what Hoch's ERA said out loud.