Bucky Dent had just one season as an above-average hitter. He had 15.5 fWAR over 11 full MLB seasons, pretty well the definition of the shortstops of the day — slap hitter, good defense, probably not actually
all that valuable even if he gives you a decent floor. Of course, nobody really cares about Bucky Dent’s fWAR, they care about the 1978 winner-take-all game, and maybe they remember him hitting .333 in the following postseason run, winning World Series MVP as the Yankees beat the Dodgers.
Bucky Dent had just one big, shining moment, and he hit himself into baseball immortality.
We don’t yet know what Cam Schlittler will be. His stuff looks incredible, and his onfield attitude seems even better. Part of me thinks the Yankees have found a top-of-rotation arm for the next decade, part of me remembers how great Luis Severino was for a number of seasons until he wasn’t, and part of me knows that baseball history is full of those who burned incredibly bright until they burned right out.
We’ll always have Bucky F’n Dent, and we’ll always have 12 strikeouts.
Cam Schlittler had the ultimate coming out party on Thursday, with arguably the single-greatest pitching performance by a rookie in postseason history.
What’s really fun is trying to imagine how the legend of Game 3 changes depending on who Cam turns out to be. Let’s say that the Gerrit Cole comparisons bear out, and we have a guy who’s a consistent Cy Young candidate, on a Hall of Fame trajectory, and earns the kind of contract that merits. That’s a 99.99 percentile outcome, the kind a franchise might only pull once in a decade.
If that’s Schlittler, and it’s not likely, Thursday night is the birth of a legend. The Yankees have sometimes had a flair for that kind of drama — Aaron Judge bouncing a ball off the center-field restaurant in his first career AB is like that. Cam’s start is even better than a singular home run, and if he turns out to be a capital-S Star, it’ll be remembered as such.
Then again, there was another guy who also homered in the same game as Judge, and we don’t remember much about Tyler Austin. Maybe that’s who Cam Schlittler is, even if I also think that’s unlikely — I do think, barring catastrophic injury, he’s going to be around in some capacity for a while — but let’s pretend it is. If your star is going to burn out before its time, what a way to spark it. The national broadcast, the winner-take-all game, the Red Sox, it’s almost too perfect. Even if Schlittler never pitches in a Major League game again, his name is carved into Yankee history.
The one downside to all this is maybe the most likely outcome. It’s unlikely Cam is Gerrit Cole 2.0 and it’s unlikely he completely washes out. I think the most likely trajectory is a really talented pitcher that gives the Yankees plenty of value without being a Hall of Fame-type, since most pitchers aren’t Hall of Fame-types. So maybe this is the risk, that he’s set his own expectations too high. You’re just not going to throw eight shutout innings with a 12:0 K:BB ratio that often.
This is where managing expectations is key. Schlittler is a part of Yankee and MLB history on his own merits, but needs to be given the space to pitch like a young pitcher, warts and all. His one bad start in his young career came against the club the Yankees face in the ALDS, the Toronto Blue Jays. If he doesn’t repeat his own incredible performance, that doesn’t make him a bust.
But for the rest of baseball history, we’ll have Cam f’n Schlittler.
