Cam Schlittler threw six scoreless innings against the Mets on Sunday at Yankee Stadium. One hit. Two walks. Eight strikeouts. The Yankees won 2-0 and his ERA dropped to 1.95, the best in the majors through Sunday.
Afterward somebody asked Aaron Judge whether his 25-year-old teammate should be in the AL MVP conversation on top of the Cy Young. Judge’s answer, via YES Network, was careful and revealing.
“They’ve got a Cy Young Award for a reason,” Judge said. “Best pitcher in the game. He’s got my vote, definitely, for the Cy Young.”
Read that again. Judge called him the best pitcher in the game and committed to him for the Cy Young, then stopped. He did not say the MVP word. That is a line, drawn politely, by a guy who has won the award twice and knows exactly what he is saying.
Judge Is Right
I agree with him, and I think the reasoning is simple. The Cy Young exists because pitchers and position players do fundamentally different jobs, and the voting body decided decades ago those jobs deserve separate recognition.
A starting pitcher in 2026 takes the ball roughly 32 times. An everyday position player affects roughly 160 games with his bat and his glove. When one guy is on the field five times as often as the other, “most valuable” starts to mean something specific.
That is not a knock on Schlittler. A 1.95 ERA at 25 years old, as the best mark in baseball, is a season people are going to remember. He should win the Cy Young unanimously, and Judge is right that he is the best pitcher alive right now.
The history backs up how rare the double is. Clayton Kershaw pulled it off in the NL in 2014. Justin Verlander did it in the AL in 2011 with Detroit. That is it in the last fifteen years, and both of those were seasons where the field of position players happened to be unusually thin.
The Bar Should Stay High
This year’s AL field is not thin. Yordan Alvarez has been the overwhelming favorite for most of the season, and Junior Caminero has put together a year that is going to draw a lot of down-ballot support after carrying Tampa Bay to the first clinch in baseball.
When two position players have that kind of case, a pitcher needs to be doing something historic to jump them. Verlander in 2011 went 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and led the league in basically everything. Kershaw in 2014 put up a 1.77 ERA and an ERA+ north of 190. Those were not close calls.
Schlittler’s season is excellent, but it is not yet at that tier, and voters should not lower the bar just because a great story showed up in a big market in September.
The more interesting part of Judge’s answer is what it says about how New York sees the next few weeks. The Yankees have a 25-year-old with the best ERA in baseball lined up to start Game 1 of a wild card series, and that is worth more to them than any trophy.
Judge has been around long enough to know that October reputations are built in three-game sets, not in November press releases. Handing Schlittler an MVP case right now does nothing for a team trying to win a title.
So no, Schlittler should not win AL MVP. He should win the Cy Young going away, start every elimination game the Yankees play, and spend the next decade making this argument again. Judge drew the line in the right place.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.