Erik Boland: Yankees' Cam Schlittler has just OK start in Boston, but he's still the king of the AL
Yankees' Cam Schlittler delivers during the first inning against the Red Sox on Thursday in Boston. Credit: AP/Charles Krupa
BOSTON — Cam Schlittler certainly has done his part to boost a rivalry that, while it hasn’t grown stale in recent years, needed a little spice.
And the native of nearby Walpole, Massachusetts, who grew up a Red Sox, has shown no signs of tiring of it.
Even on a night like Thursday, when he failed to replicate his past two successes against his hometown team.
The heat-dishing 6-6, 215-pound righthander, pitching at Fenway Park for the second time in his career, departed with the Yankees trailing the Red Sox 4-2 after allowing four unearned runs in the fifth inning of what became a 6-3 loss. The Yankees committed four errors and allowed six unearned runs.
An error charged to Amed Rosario on a blistered 112-mph ball hit by Willson Contreras opened the floodgates, which finally closed after former Yankees prospect Caleb Durbin’s two-run homer.
“Just gave them a lot of opportunities early on,” said Schlittler, who, because of the error charged to Rosario, saw his season ERA dip to a league-best 1.62 after allowing five hits and two walks in five innings (he struck out nine).
Schlittler stranded six runners in the first four innings before giving Durbin a full-count cutter in the 5-6 third baseman’s wheelhouse, the pitch neither down or in enough.
“Make a mistake, gotta pay for it,” Schlittler said.
He made few of those on April 23 here, a 4-2 Yankees victory in which he allowed two runs (one earned), four hits and one walk in what remains a season-high eight innings.
On the eve of the outing, the state of the rivalry came up in several queries as he talked to a throng of reporters representing Boston and New York equally.
“I don’t think the rivalry is as intense as it used to be,” Schlittler said.
Asked about that later in the session — specifically if he preferred to bring back the days of 20-some years ago when Yankees-Red Sox was a don’t-miss-a-pitch event — Schlittler grinned.
“For sure,” he said. “I think we’re heading in the right direction.”
Schlittler did some heavy lifting in that regard last October. Spurred on by some online nastiness directed at him and his family — his mother especially — from the lunatic fringe element of Red Sox Nation, he threw one of the best postseason games in history in a deciding Game 3 victory at the Stadium. He allowed five hits and no walks with 12 strikeouts in eight innings in the Yankees’ 4-0 win.
The easygoing Schlittler — easygoing off the mound — rightfully took joy in rubbing the collective Red Sox fan base’s noses in it afterward to the media. Then he took to social media to do the same.
That mostly died down over the winter, but it still flares up now and then. Such as before Schlittler’s previous start, June 19 against the Reds, when one particular fan who has consistently ridden the pitcher since last October posted: “Reds are gonna light u up tnite.”
After striking out a career-high 13 in a 5-0 victory over Cincinnati, Schlittler put a “rent-free” caption on the offending post, including two crying laughing emojis for good measure (as in “I live rent-free in your head.”)
Does Aaron Boone, who himself jolted the rivalry with his walk-off homer off Tim Wakefield to win the 2003 ALCS, “enjoy” the spice Schlittler has brought?
“I don’t know,” a smiling Boone said after a brief pause before Thursday’s game. “I enjoy Cam. It’s given me some things to make fun of him about in lighter moments. Obviously, this is a tremendous, storied rivalry, and Cam’s become an important part of that, certainly in the present.”
After his performance April 23, Schlittler lowered his ERA to 1.77. Entering Thursday, he actually had lowered it from there, bringing it to 1.71. And it went down even more even though he took the loss.
Just about every opponent, not just the Red Sox, has mostly looked overmatched. Schlittler, at the moment a runaway favorite to win the AL Cy Young Award, wasn’t his sharpest Thursday night, though.
After a one-out walk to Ceddanne Rafaela in the first and a catcher’s interference call on Austin Wells put two runners on, Schlittler struck out Contreras swinging at a 97-mph fastball and got Jarren Duran to ground to second. The failure of Schlittler and Wells to catch a pop-up by Durbin to start the second and a hit by pitch with one out again put two on, but Schlittler retired two straight, blowing away Marcelo Mayer with a 99-mph fastball.
Schlittler’s fastball touched 100 mph multiple times in a 1-2-3 third in which he struck out two of his nine batters before facing a second-and-third jam in the fourth. Schlittler sent Carlos Narvaez back to the dugout after he badly missed on a 99-mph fastball and Mayer stood no chance against a 100-mph seed to end the inning.
“I think he’s probably been the best pitcher in the American League the first half of the season,” Boone said.
As Boone well knows and Red Sox fans definitely can attest, there’s no “probably” about it.
A rare night in which Schlittler wasn’t at his best didn’t change that.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
