Who is he and where did he come from?
He’s Tommy Kahnle and, like most relievers in their mid-to-late 30s, he comes from all over the league. As one of the rare baseball players to grow up in upstate New York, Kahnle settled for Division II baseball in college before being selected by the Yankees in the 2010 amateur draft. But he made his big league debut with the Rockies, who swiped him from the Yankees in the Rule 5 draft, and has since spent 11 years in the majors, dividing his time between Colorado, the South Side of Chicago, the Bronx, Chavez Ravine, the Bronx again, and Detroit. The Sox signed him to a minor league deal yesterday
Kahnle was a big part of those Yankee super-bullpens of recent vintage, which is probably where you know him from. In fact, for the entire stretch between 2016 and 2024, Kahnle’s 3.11 ERA ranked 28th amongst relievers who threw at least 250 innings. He was a flat-out solid and dependable late-inning option for years, heavily relying on one of the game’s best changeups, which darts down and in on the arm-side. Earlier in his career he complemented that change with a fastball that approached 100 MPH, but that’s now down to the mid-90s.
Kahnle has battled injuries recently. From 2020 through 2023, he made just 14 appearances, missing significant time to both Tommy John surgery and subsequent forearm issues, and he then missed the first two months of the 2024 season with shoulder inflammation.
2025 was an up-and-down season for Kahnle in Detroit. He was outstanding for the first three months of the year, posting a 1.77 ERA in 35.1 innings pitched. But then he gave up five earned runs without recording a single out in his first appearance in July and looked cooked for the rest of the season, yielding 32 hits and 22 walks over 27.1 innings en route to an ugly 7.90 ERA. He made 32 appearances from July through the end of the season and gave up at least 1 run in 12 of them.
Tl;dr, just give me his 2025 stats.
63 IP, 51 H, 31 BB, 8 HR, 4.43 ERA
Show me a cool highlight.
Remember when I wrote that Kahnle relied heavily on his changeup? Well he once threw 61 of them in a row in 2024 playoffs while allowing just 2 earned runs over 8.2 innings.
Here’s a video of the first 56 of those:
What’s he doing in his picture up there?
Celebrating the fact that he now gets to join a bullpen with Garrett Whitlock, who, like him, is another quality reliever the Yankees lost in the Rule 5 draft. Lol, losers!
What’s his role on the 2026 Red Sox?
He’s signed to a minor league deal, but I fully expect him to be in the big league bullpen as soon as they deem him ready. He’ll start in a middle-innings role and whether he stays there will depend on whether he can figure out what went wrong in the second half of 2025.
