Yankees’ Aaron Boone breaks silence on ‘surprising’ starter

New York Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes was not happy about being demoted to the bullpen.

After making his first regular-season relief pitcher appearance since 2021 on Saturday, the 29-year-old said, “Of course I was upset. I feel like I was the workhorse of all the starters here. When (Gerrit) Cole went down, they picked me to be the Opening Day starter; not necessarily No. 1, but the Opening Day starter. I had to change my routine there, and now they’re doing it,” Bryan Hoch of MLB.com said.

Any time a player expresses dissatisfaction, it is likely to cause some uproar, especially among the team’s decision makers.

The decision maker in this case would be Yankees manager Aaron Boone. Boone, however, did not seem too bothered by Cortes’ words.

“I don’t need everybody to be happy with everything,” Boone said Sunday morning, according to the New York Post. “I want them to want and expect the best. There comes a time when you have to make tough decisions and then it’s up to all of us, the players, to go out there and do our jobs and be professionals and we saw that (on Saturday) with Nestor.”

Cortes has pitched 163.1 innings this season, the most on the Yankees’ roster. The decision to send him to the bullpen comes as a result of the return of Luis Gil and Clarke Schmidt from the IL, which has created a bottleneck in New York’s rotation.

“He clearly wants to be in the starting lineup and there’s certainly good reasons for that. He’s now returning to the rotation,” Boone added. “But we’ve also seen a guy come out in a low-scoring game, shine and finish a great day for us on the mound. So no, (I’m) totally OK with that.”

Even though Cortes isn’t happy with his role as a reliever, the 4.1 hitless innings he threw Saturday proved he can be a tremendous asset in the bullpen.

“He clearly wants to be in the starting lineup and there’s certainly good reasons for that. He’s getting back into the rotation now. But we’ve also seen a guy come out in a low-scoring game and shine and finish a great day for us on the mound. So no, (I’m) totally OK with that,” Boone said.

The current plan calls for New York to play with a six-man rotation next week before reducing the rotation to five for the final two weeks of the regular season.

Time will tell what role Cortes will play in the postseason.