Yankees 2026 Season Preview: Cam Schlittler

It’s really hard not to get excited about Cam Schlittler. His 2025 was a season of dreams, seeing the young right-hander start the year with Double-A Trenton, and ending it with one of the best playoff starts in the history of the entire Yankee franchise. In a year without Gerrit Cole, the Yankees kind of made Gerrit Cole out of whole cloth, and now the challenge is going to be managing expectations as a young pitcher adjusts to a full season at the MLB level.

2025 Stats: 14 starts, 73.0 IP, 4-3, 2.96 ERA (138 ERA+), 3.74 FIP, 3.77 xFIP, 27.6% K%, 10.2% BB%, 0.99 HR/9, 1.22 WHIP, 1.3 fWAR

2026 FanGraphs Depth Charts Projections: 23 starts, 121.0 IP, 8-7, 4.04 ERA, 4.11 FIP, 23.1% K%, 8.7% BB%, 1.18 HR/9, 1.28 WHIP, 1.7 fWAR

For Cam, everything starts with the hot stuff, a four-seam fastball that sits 98 mph and can be cranked up to 101 when he needs it. Pairing with a cutter, he’ll throw a fastball around 75 percent of the time, which is pretty surprising for pitchers in today’s game. His primary breaking pitch is a curve and he threw a show-me sweeper, and that’s really where the focus needs to be for Cam to up his game. The “black mark,” or more appropriately, blue marks on his Statcast sheet come from those breaking pitches.

I do think that the velocity, shape and extension that Schlittler gets on his fastballs means that he can let them dominate his repertoire, but you need to have a third “go” pitch, especially against right-handed hitters where the effectiveness of your cutter starts to go away. Ditto for his curveball which is much more effective against lefties — a sweeper or slider or changeup needs to be part of the repertoire. Fortunately if I can figure that out, the Yankees should be able to figure it out, and I imagine that’s a focal point of Cam’s spring training.

The other key to Schlittler’s year is workload management. He threw a grand total of 149.2 innings across Double-A, Triple-A and the majors, plus another 14.1 in the postseason. That indicates to me that he can probably handle a full season’s worth of innings in 2026, especially as the Yankees can allow for a tweak in the rotation or a skipped start here and there when Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón return from injury.

The final thing to remember is balancing the sky-high ceiling we saw in that Wild Card Series start against Boston, with the reality that this is still a pitcher about to embark on his first full year in the majors. Schlittler will eventually have a bad game, MLB hitters will figure out a trick or chink in the young man’s armor, and he’ll be slapped around. The onus will then be on him to re-adjust back, and while I think he has the talent to do that, it’s still going to be a process to watch a young pitcher do so.

At full health, the Yankees should boast one of the better pitching staffs in all of baseball. There’s a decent chance that by August, Cam Schlittler could be the fourth-best pitcher in the rotation, even with all the talent that we’ve seen so far. That the guys ahead of him on that list are veterans like Max Fried and Cole mean he’s stepping into a pretty ideal apprenticeship, the perfect environment to take all the potential he shows and polish it into a final product.

See more of the Yankees Previews series here.