The Yankees officially have their seventh AL Cy Young Award winner in franchise history! Cam Schlittler rightly claimed a clean sweep of the highest pitching award in the land, becoming the third Yankee after Ron Guidry in 1978 and Gerrit Cole in 2023 to win the award in unanimous fashion. He fended off fellow frontrunner Dylan Cease with a stretch of late season excellence to author the best pitching season in franchise history since Guidry’s extraterrestrial award-winning campaign, finishing the year 14-6 in 33 starts, with a 1.95 ERA (215 ERA+), 2.56 FIP, 0.92 WHIP, and 239 strikeouts in 193.2 innings, leading all AL starters with 6.2 fWAR and setting a single-season franchise record with 21 starts allowing one or fewer runs. After enduring a 22 year drought since Roger Clemens took home the prize in 2001, the Yankees have now claimed two of the last four AL Cy Young’s between Cole and now Schlittler.
With Schlittler’s meteoric rise from an obscure draft pick to unheralded prospect to playoff hero to now the best pitcher in the AL, I would like to offer a mea culpa of sorts. I am not ashamed to admit that I was wrong about the Yankees’ now-undisputed ace.
First, I’ll give myself a small bit of credit for identifying Schlittler as the team’s breakout pitcher during 2025 spring training. While certainly impressed by his high octane velocity that seemingly came out of nowhere, I had my reservations about the repeatability of his mechanics and the resulting lack of command I believed that conferred. I was sharply critical during his first six or so starts during the regular season in 2025 about what I perceived as him being a thrower rather than a pitcher, his imprecise command, and the erratic nature of his slider. I went back to the time period surrounding those half-dozen starts to pull a few of my own quotes evaluating his up-and-down performances that yielded a 3.94 ERA, 5.26 FIP, and 10.8-percent walk rate at the time:
“Cam Schlittler’s principal issue since being promoted to the big league rotation has been a complete lack of command over his secondary pitches.”
“For all the velocity he possesses, far too often Schlittler seemingly has no idea where the slider is going which effectively removes the pitch as a reasonable selection. No amount of velocity in the world will then save you once you become a fastball-only pitcher.”
“The command of the slider was an issue with too many staying elevated or in the heart of the zone. He actually reworked the pitch in the offseason, adding velocity at the expense of movement — he even said during the postgame that he now considers the pitch to be a cutter rather than a gyro slider as Statcast currently has it categorized. I’m not convinced the current version of the pitch can be a reliable swing-and-miss option and I’d like to see him expand the use of the sweeper in advantageous counts.”
“His cutter was a home run machine when he first came up owing to a propensity to miss middle-middle.”
Suffice to say I did not envision at that point that roughly 15 months later, Schlittler would be unanimously selected as the 2026 Cy Young winner. And all the credit goes to him for not only identifying the areas of his game that needed improvement, but actively seeking help from the Yankees pitching coaches and his veteran teammates in the rotation. It is said that Schlittler is among the most eager and proactive pitchers in the organization at pouring over the pitch metric data and high-speed video to find the subtle adjustments for fine-tuning grip, finger positioning, release, and arm path mechanics, squeezing every drop out of his physical gifts.
One of the first things I noticed this year was a simplifying of his delivery. In 2025, it seemed he relied too much on brute arm speed to supply velocity, the longer arm path and more maximum effort delivery robbing him of precise fastball command. In 2026, he learned to engage his lower half more, sinking his hips to draw more power from his leg drive. This allowed him to shorten his takeaway and turned his somewhat loopy arm path into a more compact stroke, which not only sharpened his command but gave him access to a few more ticks on the heater, allowing him to touch 101 mph. With a more repeatable delivery, Schlittler found he could live on the top shelf of the strike zone with relative ease.
Schlittler’s receptiveness to feedback is super impressive, especially for a young player with rapidly growing hype surrounding him. He sought out Cole before the season, and a conversation they had about reshaping his slider into a cutter and throwing it as hard as he could unlocked a new level for Schlittler. Thus, he was able to transform probably the weakest facet of his game — a slider with unpredictable command — into one of the best cutters in the game, which also boosted the effectiveness of his four-seamer and sinker given the way its movement diverged from that latter pair of pitches. Adding the cutter is what allowed him to excel while throwing a fastball variant 89.3-percent of the time.
What impressed me most — and another piece of overwhelming evidence that Schlittler is indeed a pitcher and not just a thrower — is his constant quest to find that next level. Not content to simply rest on the laurels of his three overpowering fastballs, Schlittler evolved his game in the second half of the season by developing a unicorn curveball that could play off his new-found mastery of the top of the zone. Facing a Red Sox team fully expecting him to go heavy fastball when they met in the AL Wild Card Series, Schlittler threw a career-high 32 curveballs to completely confound their gameplan. This ability to be a step ahead of the opposition to me is evidence of Schlittler’s dedication to his craft.
It absolutely delights me to say how wrong I was about Schlittler in his first taste of the bigs. More and more pitchers these days can touch triple digits with their fastball. It is the rare player like Schlittler who is never satisfied with his physical gifts, and this insatiable push to keep becoming a better version of himself is why this unanimous AL Cy Young might not be the last of his career.
