The last three games have been an adventure with the Yankees bullpen, and not a particularly fun one either. Yes, they secured the win in two out of three, but boy have David Bednar and Camilo Doval put Yankees fans through the wringer in the ninth inning against the Mets and the first two against Toronto. Doval’s final out to secure the save against on Tuesday night is the moment we’ll look at this time on Sequence of the Week.
We join Doval with two outs in the ninth. The back of the Yankees bullpen is short following Bednar and Fernando Cruz’s exertions in the previous two games, leaving Doval as the lone remaining option to close out this game. It’s been far from smooth sailing for the flame throwing righty, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. cutting the Yankees’ lead to one with a sac fly after Doval gave up an Andrés Giménez walk and Ernie Clement single to open the frame. After the Vlad Jr. sac fly, Daulton Varsho reached on an infield single when Doval forgot to cover first base on the grounder to the right side, putting runners on the corners and bringing the Blue Jays’ team leader in home runs Kazuma Okamoto to the plate.
Renowned during his San Francisco days for his triple digits cutter, Doval instead starts Okamoto off with a sinker — a pitch he has been working on behind the scenes with Matt Blake and the rest of the Yankees pitching coaches.
This is pretty close to a perfect pitch — a 100-mph sinker right on the bottom shelf of the strike zone. It’s a called strike if Okamoto doesn’t swing, but commanded to a location where it’s almost impossible to do damage. It’s honestly impressive that Okamoto recognizes it as a strike — given it started off the plate away before tailing back into the zone — and is able to catch a piece and tap it foul.
Following the excellent execution of the first pitch sinker, Doval tries to keep the muscle memory of that release point by targeting the same location with the same pitch.
He manages to achieve the same lateral release point, but this sinker is elevated relative to the previous one. This makes it a more hittable pitch, but it appears that Okamoto is in fight-off mode, perhaps hunting a pitch inside, and he fires a late, off-balance swing and fouls it off to the right.
Doval is now just one strike away from locking down the save. Just one more decent execution of a pitch away from sending all those of a Yankees persuasion home happy. After showing Okamoto a pair of in-breaking sinkers, Doval looks to put him away with a cutter that moves away from the hitter, Austin Wells setting a target low and away.
The key to throwing a good cutter is staying behind and through the ball, something which Doval fails to do here. He almost slings this pitch rather than finishing out in front, causing the pitch to sail wildly inside as it backs up rather than cuts, and Okamoto has to spin out of the way to avoid getting hit.
After mis-executing that cutter so poorly, Doval immediately scraps the pitch and goes back to the sinker. He still has the feeling of having executed two good ones to open the AB, he just has to find that release point again and it should be game over.
Instead, Doval makes a mistake releasing this pitch a hair too early, and it ends up middle-middle. Fortunately for him and his teammates, Okamoto has never quite figured out the correct swing path to match up against Doval’s sinker, and though he is right on time and clubs this ball at 103 mph, he impacts the top of the baseball sending a routine grounder to Anthony Volpe for the game-ending ground out. That is the margin of error that being able to throw over 100 mph affords the pitcher, allowing Doval to get a ground out on a mistake pitch.
Here’s the full sequence:
There is a lot to like from this sequence from Doval. For starters, he managed to find the zone with all three of the sinkers he threw — no small feat considering how much walks have tended to hurt him in his career. They surprisingly haven’t been as big of an issue this year, but his general wildness this campaign has seen him fall behind in counts and then cough up a home run as he is forced into the middle of the zone. I was also impressed by Doval’s ability to immediately flush the previous play when he forgot to cover first. It would be easy to let that moment linger and impact his concentration against Okamoto, but he turned the page quickly and focused fully on this AB.
Finally, I am intrigued by Doval’s progress with this new sinker — a pitch that went from a 12.2-percent usage rate in 2025 to his most used pitch so far in 2026 at a 41.7-percent usage rate. Doval is perennially among the league leaders in ground ball rate and this gives him another weapon to maintain those levels. It’s a pitch I’m excited to analyze more deeply in my new series about the Yankees bringing the sinker back into vogue, so stay tuned! While I’m certainly not ready to say that I trust Doval in spots as high leverage at this, it’s a positive first step toward re-earning the trust to pitch in late-game situations.
