There was a flame-throwing tube man on George’s mound yesterday who made and ruined many evenings. This, he reveled in. “To be able to go out there and put their season down,” the New York Yankees’ 6-foot-6 rookie phenom Cam Schlittler said after pummeling his hometown Sawx in a wild-card finale. “That's something I can hold over everyone I know back home for at least another year.”
Schlittler, 24, began his postseason debut—the do-or-die conclusion to the latest chapter in baseball’s most historic rivalry—throwing triple-digit gas. He left, eight shutout innings and 12 strikeouts later, with the game and crowd in the palm of his hand. Across a 107-pitch display (75 strikes, 22 of them on the first pitch), the towering right-hander made many different Red Sox look many kinds of foolish. In the first half inning alone, Schlittler threw six pitches of 100 mph or more, including one that had Boston’s third baseman and famed trash can percussionist Alex Bregman staring at his bat as if it were a pen without ink. All game, the hurler dotted corners, jammed hands, blew folks plain out of the water.
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There are a plethora of blessings and curses to augur from October baseball, but none induce more joy and fear than the emergence of an unflappable greenhorn—a pup methodically toeing the rubber with a pair of XXL paws. Schlittler, all low leg kicks and over-the-top deliveries and sedated pride, appears to be that and more. For these Yankees, his emergence could unlock a path back to another pennant, revenge for last year’s prime-time self-destruction, or simply a few piquant fall evenings. The most riveting part of Schlittler’s high-speed act is that it could ultimately mean anything.
Calling his wild card–clinching curtain-raiser a mere beatdown is, in a way, underselling the performance. By the seventh inning, the lanky hurler had shattered both the Yankee record for most strikeouts in a playoff debut and the MLB record for most strikeouts in a win-or-go-home showdown. Over Schlittler’s entire outing, a single base runner reached scoring position: No one else got as far as third base.
In the cool October moonlight, he wielded a four-seamer and sinker to great effect, firing both pitches to the outer reaches of the strike zone and, when his opponents adapted to this tactic, beyond it. After a strikeout, Schlittler would do a little rapid, short-gaited skip—exiting the mound before the hitter had even vacated the batter’s box. The rookie interspersed both heaters with a stone-sharp cutter that sat around 93 mph and was an effective, if barely slower, feint. (Schlittler rarely used a breaking ball, on Thursday throwing just 11 total off-speed pitches over the entire start.) His pitching motion, plain, efficient, and uncommonly fluid, helps him hide his grip and keep batters off-balance. By night’s end, Schlittler had broken his career high in strikeouts, innings, and pitches, on the brightest stage of his life.
The outing was the high point in a rapid, bewildering professional ascent. Raised 25 miles south of Boston, in Walpole, Massachusetts, Schlittler played his college ball at Northeastern University. He declared for the draft after his junior year, and the Yankees took a flier on him in the seventh round in 2022. Schlittler was just a gangly 21-year-old at the time, with a fastball that topped out in the low 90s, but New York immediately went about the task of refining his mechanics. The goal in those early years was to add more muscle on his frame, up both his velocity and spin rate. In Low-A ball, in 2023, Schlittler hovered around 89 or 90 mph. By 2024, he was up to approximately 93 mph. During spring training this year, Schlittler sat between 95 and 96 mph. He started this season in Double-A and dominated to the tune of a 2.38 ERA in 53 innings. A few months later, after Yankees starter Clarke Schmidt tore his UCL, Schlittler made his debut in the Bronx.
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In 14 big-league starts, he registered a 2.96 ERA and 10.4 strikeouts per nine innings. Schlittler’s average fastball comes in at 98 mph and is in the 95th percentile for all pitchers, according to Baseball Savant, and he throws it around 55 percent of the time. His secondary cudgel, at a 21 percent usage rate, is a 92 mph cutter that maintains a significant horizontal bite. (He also boasts a curveball, a sweeper, and a sinker that he began incorporating toward the end of the season.) Schlittler tends to locate his fastball in the upper quadrants of the strike zone; he’s partial to backdooring his cutter on the right corner. Thus far, he’s mostly been able to sidestep extensive usage of his breaking pitches. Owing to the swiftness of Schlittler’s climb, he’s slipped through the cracks of baseball’s traditional prospect-ranking complex. MLB Pipeline has never had him in its Top 100 rankings, and Baseball America listed him as just the 89th-ranked prospect in the sport. (FanGraphs, for its part, had him slotted at 48th on its most recent 2025 list.)
Schlittler arrived in New York at a time of profound need, and his growth in the three months that he’s been a part of the rotation continues to raise the team’s ceiling. Despite their feast-or-famine reliance on the long ball this season, the Bombers—one through nine—can hit with nearly anyone. Perceptions about their defensive deficiencies likewise linger, but the most glaring roster hole for them this year has been an underachieving bullpen. If their postseason run continues past the Toronto Blue Jays and the AL Division Series, an arm like Schlittler’s could be the separator between an exposed and rested bullpen in a seven-game series.
Whether his flame-throwing tendencies are sustainable in the long term or indicative of a future top-of-the-rotation arm is impossible to determine with absolute certainty. It’s also, kinda, beside the point. In the here and now—and in the nick of time—the Yanks have their hands on a gas-pumping, out-of-nowhere phenom. The kind that’s green enough to admit on camera that he “blacked out” after the game and dogged enough to relish silencing both his “hometown team” and all his folks “back home.” October doesn’t exist for future ramifications. We’re all here for some kind of show. Schlittler is chopping wood, carrying water, donning two sets of neckwear, and framing do-or-die rivalry clashes as deeply personal. For at least the fall, he’s got more revelry in him, more evenings to make or break.
