RailRiders Bring Triple-A's Best Bullpen ERA Into Rochester Showdown
Scranton/Wilkes-Barre's bullpen posted a 2.23 ERA through eight games, best in Triple-A, as Luis Gil took the mound Sunday at ESL Ballpark against Rochester.
The RailRiders carried Triple-A baseball's most effective bullpen into Rochester on Sunday, where a 5-3 record and a 2.23 relief ERA framed a matchup against the Red Wings at ESL Ballpark with genuine stakes for the Yankees' organizational depth chart.
Through eight games, the SWB relief corps had logged 32.1 innings, allowing just eight earned runs while striking out 34 batters and collecting four wins and three saves. Those numbers stood as the best bullpen mark in all of Triple-A and represented the clearest explanation for why the RailRiders had posted a winning record despite committing 13 errors, the most of any team at the level.
Right-hander Luis Gil drew the starting assignment. Gil posted a 7.04 ERA across two Triple-A starts in 2025, striking out 11 in 7.2 innings, but his swingman upside and swing-and-miss arsenal kept him on the radar for Yankees evaluators sizing up late-season options. Rochester countered with Andry Lara, whose spring line read 4.0 innings, four hits, one run, one home run, one walk and four strikeouts, a performance that set up Sunday's contest as a potential pitcher's duel at the top of the order.
The two relievers most responsible for the bullpen's numbers were Yerry De Los Santos and Kervin Castro. De Los Santos delivered a 2.2-inning scoreless outing with a season-high four strikeouts in a recent appearance, while Castro had established himself as the closer candidate after a string of clean outings and a first save recorded in a one-run game.
Veteran outfielder and first baseman Seth Brown, added to the roster on April 2, provided an immediate offensive return: a .417 average with a home run across three games. His production gave a young lineup a steadying presence at a time when the defense had been anything but steady.
The bulk of those defensive problems traced to first base. Ernesto Martinez Jr. had committed six of the club's 13 errors, a figure the organization acknowledged openly while flagging defensive fundamentals as a midseason correction target. For now, the bullpen was good enough to absorb the damage. Whether that remained true deep into April would tell the Yankees plenty about how much further this roster still needed to grow.
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