Forget the final score. Yankees 2, Mets 0 barely hints at what happened Sunday at Yankee Stadium. Cam Schlittler took the ball, allowed one hit over six innings, struck out eight, and left the Bronx with the best ERA in the major leagues.
Schlittler passed Milwaukee's Jacob Misiorowski for the major league ERA lead with this outing, and it's not a fluke. This was his 21st start this season allowing one run or none. That's absurd for a pitcher this young: the only other pitcher 25 or younger to do it in the last century-plus is Dean Chance, back in 1964. That's the company Schlittler is keeping.
I'll go further: if the Yankees make a serious October run, Schlittler will be the reason, not Aaron Judge, who went 0-for-3 Sunday and is still searching for his timing since coming off the injured list. Judge is a franchise cornerstone and he'll figure it out. But right now, in mid-September, the best pitcher in the sport not named a two-way unicorn in Los Angeles is wearing pinstripes, and he's not the guy anyone's talking about in trade deadline retrospectives or awards previews. That needs to change.
Credit to the other side: Christian Scott didn't get run out of the building. He allowed two runs on three hits over six innings and struck out seven, including Judge multiple times. That's a quality start most nights. It just ran into something better. Ben Rice's leadoff home run and Austin Wells breaking out of a slump with a third-inning shot gave the Yankees all the cushion Schlittler needed. Against a pitcher that locked in, two runs might as well have been ten.
The bullpen trio of Brent Headrick, Paul Blackburn and David Bednar closed it out clean, Bednar picking up his save in a season where he's been about as automatic as a closer gets. But nobody's going to remember the eighth inning. They're going to remember that the Yankees have a starter who might be pitching himself into a Cy Young conversation, and possibly stranger things. There's already talk of Schlittler in an MVP conversation, alongside pitchers like Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw who've pulled that off this century. I won't go that far yet. But I'm not laughing it off, either.
As for the Mets: this loss closes out a season series that finished even, and the Mets have actually played well since the trade deadline. That matters for next year. It doesn't matter today. Today was about one pitcher making a great team look ordinary, and the Yankees, at 86-63 and pushing toward a postseason berth that isn't clinched yet, should be thrilled that pitcher is theirs.
