Cam Schlittler shoved again Sunday, the Yankees beat the Mets, and his ERA fell to 1.95. That is not a hot month anymore. That is a season, and the Cam Schlittler Cy Young conversation is effectively over except for the paperwork.
What makes it land harder is where it happened. A Subway Series Sunday in September is the loudest ordinary game on the New York calendar, the kind of afternoon where a young starter either grows two inches or shrinks one. He grew.
And then his manager went further. Aaron Boone, asked about the Cy Young, said out loud that he thinks his starter belongs in the American League MVP conversation too. Managers say nice things about their guys in September. They do not usually say that one.
Why Cam Schlittler is the Cy Young favorite
A 1.95 ERA this deep into a schedule is the whole argument. There is no more small-sample escape hatch in the middle of September, no "give it another eight starts and we'll see." The starts have happened. The number held.
What gets me is the speed of the climb. This is the same arm that walked into a winner-take-all Wild Card game against Boston last October as a rookie and threw eight shutout innings with twelve strikeouts, in Yankee Stadium, in a game that ends somebody's year. Most guys need a few seasons to learn how to breathe in that air. He showed up already knowing.
Has a pitcher ever won AL MVP?
They have, just not lately, and that is the part that makes Boone's comment more than clubhouse politics. Since 1990, exactly three pitchers have taken home an MVP award:
| Pitcher | Year | League |
|---|---|---|
| Dennis Eckersley | 1992 | AL |
| Justin Verlander | 2011 | AL |
| Clayton Kershaw | 2014 | NL |
Three in thirty-six years. Voters decided a long time ago that a starter who works every fifth day is being measured against men who play every day, and the tiebreaker almost always goes to the position player. Fair or not, that is the standing rule.
checked the almanac: eckersley won his in a relief role, verlander and kershaw both needed seasons that felt like a dare, and every one of the three still had to survive a ballot argument that had nothing to do with how they pitched.
So Boone is not making a prediction. He is making a case, in public, in the window when ballots start forming in people's heads. That is a manager doing his job.
What comes next for the Yankees
The Yankees head to Minnesota on Monday night, first pitch 7:41 ET, and the Mets host Baltimore at 7:11. Two clubs walking out of the same weekend in very different moods.
For Schlittler, the remaining starts are less about the award than the arm. A young pitcher in his first full trip through a big-league calendar is carrying more innings than he has ever carried, and September is when that bill usually arrives. It has not arrived yet. The Yankees will be watching the stuff, the velocity late in outings, the leash, all of it, because the version of this story that matters most to them is not the trophy in November. It is what he looks like in October.
And if that sounds like a low bar for a guy sitting at 1.95, remember what he did in October the last time somebody handed him the ball with the season on it.
I'll be watching his next turn, and specifically how deep they let him go.