It’s becoming very easy to treat Cam Schlittler as a superhero, the old school television programs that end with the protagonist once again disposing of the villain, with everything present on screen except the ads for cereal are replaced by ones for so-called prediction markets that are rotting the brains of 30 percent of the male population. Throw whatever obstacle at him you want — playoff start, the hated rival, a lineup that refuses to score — and he’ll overcome it. I am at least slightly convinced
the Yankees scoring nine runs last Tuesday had something to do with Cam.
Tonight he once again faces his toughest test of the year, tasked with preventing the Rays from taking what would be a strangling 2-0 lead in the ALDS. If there was one pitcher on planet Earth, with full respect to Jacob Misiorowski, that I would trust to lead my team away from that fate, it would be Cam Schlittler.
The what is one thing, and that’s discussed above. The how and why are different questions.
Cam’s disposal of the Red Sox last week was a particularly notable one, as the righty drastically changed his approach to pitching. If you’re standing in the box against Cam, there’s about a 90 percent chance he throws you some kind of fastball, and your job is to figure out, in the 0.4 seconds it takes for that pitch to reach the plate, whether it has rise, cut, or run. That approach has put Cam in the pole position for the AL Cy Young Award, just throw F*** You fastballs all around the strike zone and good things will happen.
Except, against the Red Sox, something changed:
You still get a lot of the No. 1, Cam will never abandon the four-seamer that’s made him one of the three or so best pitchers in the world. He caught the Sox completely flat footed with his curveball though, after the club reportedly spent the entire final regular season in Tampa working off his heaters on Tropicana Field’s Trejekt machine.
It’s hard to tell what’s funnier, that Cam got a 50 percent (!) whiff rate on the bender that night, or that while he edged out eight whiffs he got another six called for strikes. Boston doesn’t have the best lineup in baseball, but they’re still MLB players, and they were bamboozled by the change in gameplan.
And we’ve seen this with Cam before — what makes me so supremely confident in him, and what drives my desire for the Yankees to work out an extension with him the moment labor strife in the sport is resolved is that ability to tweak in-between starts. He gave up four home runs against the Tigers on June 30th, and then just six in the 15 starts and 89.2 innings he threw to close the year. He walked five against the Red Sox on August 28th, a start that could have made us otherwise nervous given his dominance of his hometown team. After that he made five starts to finish up his Cy Young campaign, 30 innings of work, and walked just seven combined.
Then of course facing a Boston team so geared up for velo on Tuesday, Cam quite literally bent the gameplan and pitched the game of his life, again. Mike Trout used to do this, at the height of his powers he would look at a part of his game that wasn’t A+ and just decide to make it A+. Mike Trout is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, maybe the best five-tool talent I have ever seen for an extended period of his career, and I am not quite ready to say that Cam Schlittler is at that level, but damn if he isn’t trying.
But he doesn’t face Boston tonight, he faces Tampa Bay. Instead of the league’s 17th best offense, it’s the sixth best. The Red Sox struck out 21.7 percent of the time, below league average to be clear but three full points higher than Tampa’s K-rate. They do have one thing in common though.
Boston was the worst team in baseball facing curveballs, -7 runs against the pitch. Tampa Bay is the second-worst, -5.7. Now we get into game theory, and perhaps paralysis by analysis. If I know how bad Tampa is against curves, and Tampa just watched the Red Sox get led around Yankee Stadium on a leash made of breaking balls, the Rays have to be gameplanning against a repeat, curve-heavy performance.
Cam’s made three starts against the Rays this year, and has actually underperformed to his own baseline, posting a gaudy 2.81 ERA in 16 innings. He has also struck out seven Rays for every one he walked so, maybe the gameplan is just “do that again.” Then again, he owns the lowest ERA of any pitcher ever against the Red Sox, and became a completely different man when taking them down Tuesday. Maybe we get F*** You Fastball Cam, maybe we get Schlittler on a bender, maybe there’s something else he’s cooking up. The joy of watching Cam Schlittler over the last year and a half has been witnessing the evolution of an ace, and the next chapter comes tonight.
