There are two ironclad ways for a player to become a New York Yankees fan favorite: Give ’em something to remember you by, and punish the Boston Red Sox while you’re at it.
Cam Schlittler just showed how it’s done, leading the Yankees past the Red Sox in a 4-0 win in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series. They’re on to the American League Division Series to face the Toronto Blue Jays, while Schlittler is already occupying a whole bunch of special places in history.
The 24-year-old rookie righty logged 8.0 scoreless innings, allowing only five hits with no walks and 12 strikeouts. The situation calls for bullet points, and these are liable to knock your socks into the next zip code:
This is what they used to call a “star turn,” and what makes this one all the more remarkable is that it was a case of a starter showcasing closer-caliber stuff for 107 pitches.
Schittler averaged 98.9 mph on his fastball and topped triple digits 11 times. For starters, in the pitch tracking era, only he and Nathan Eovaldi have thrown that many 100-mph fastballs in a game while wearing Yankees pinstripes.
Schlittler had only made 14 regular-season starts before putting himself on the map on Thursday. And as a former seventh-round pick from the 2022 draft, you could say he beat the odds simply by making it to the majors.
Yet the Schlittler who sparkled so brilliantly in the spotlight on Thursday isn’t so different from the one who had been looming larger and larger on Yankees fans’ radars throughout 2025. He began the year as the organization’s No. 2 prospect for Baseball America, and his quick emergence after his debut on July 9 coincided perfectly with a rough spell on the part of Max Fried.
As everyone surely noticed as he silenced Boston for 6.1 innings in Game 1 of the Wild Card Series, Fried is all better now. Carlos Rodón is likewise an ace-caliber pitcher who provided an ace-caliber performance in Game 2, thus setting up Schlittler with a hard act to follow in a do-or-die game.
That he so decisively chose “do” sure took heat off Yankees manager Aaron Boone, whose chair has been so hot for so long that he probably walks around with Teflon sewn into his pants. And as he looks ahead to Toronto and the ALDS, he has every reason to think his job just got a whole lot easier.
Boone will get to begin that series with reigning AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil in Game 1. Though he was left off the Yankees’ roster for the Wild Card Series, he finished the year on a strong note with a sub-3.00 ERA in September.
Boone can hope that Gil sets the tone in the best-of-five series before he turns the rotation back over to what he now knows to be not two, but three big guns: Fried, Rodón and Schlittler.
Granted, expecting Schlittler to do that again just because he did it once is expecting too much. But any time a pitcher can even plant a thought like that in people’s heads, that’s how you know he’s done something truly special.
