The Power of the Curve

Brad Penner-Imagn Images Cam Schlittler threw the Red Sox a curveball in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series. Well, actually, he threw them a lot of curveballs — 32, to be exact. In the Yankees’ resounding 9-0 win over their archrivals last week at Yankee Stadium, the 25-year-old flamethrower went 6 1/3 scoreless innings, giving up just two hits and one walk while striking out 10 and throwing a career-high 117 pitches. Except for the pitch count, his final line reflects the same dominance we’ve seen repeatedly throughout a 2026 season in which Schlittler went 14-6 with a 1.95 ERA, a 2.56 FIP, and 6.2 WAR across 193 2/3 innings. The difference this time was how he got there, and it poses a new challenge for opposing batters when he starts against the Rays in Game 2 of the ALDS on Monday night at Tropicana Field. Schlittler turned to the curveball early and often, utterly baffling a Boston lineup that was geared up for his signature three-fastball repertoire. Instead, they got a heavy dose of the hook and couldn’t handle it. In Game 1, he threw his curveball 27.4% of the time. The Red Sox swung at 16 of the 32 curves they saw from Schlittler, whiffing on eight of them, fouling off six, and putting two in play; the first of those two fair balls was a softly hit lineout to shortstop in the fifth inning, while the second came when Wilyer Abreu lined the right-hander’s last pitch of the game to right field for a single. Four of Schlittler’s 10 strikeout pitches were curveballs, all during his first time through the order. It’s hard to blame them for not expecting so many curves. This was Schlittler’s sixth time facing the Red Sox in either the regular season or the playoffs, with all six starts coming within a span of 363 days. Over his previous five outings — beginning with last year’s coming out party in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series, when he threw eight scoreless innings of five-hit ball with no walks and 12 strikeouts — he threw a combined 41 curves out of 489 pitches, a rate of 8.4%. In 2026, he used his curveball 9.8% of the time, well below the usage rates of his four-seamer (44.5%), cutter (25.6%), and sinker (19.3%). “He was not just using it more, but he was using it very effectively,” said Red Sox manager Chad Tracy. “He landed it if he wanted to for strikes. He was able to get it beneath for swing and miss. We weren’t able to do much with him.” The decision to lean on the curve was the result of astute game-planning, strong execution, and a commitment from the best pitcher in the American League to refine his craft. What we saw last week was more than just a one-off performance, but an indication of how much better Schlittler can still get. “Cam is really good, but there’s a higher ceiling, I believe,” Yankees left-hander Carlos Rodón told me. “[The curveball] is part of the evolution. The three-fastball [mix] makes him. They all move different ways; they’re all hard. So when he throws the curveball, it changes the look for the hitters.” “He’s getting more feel with it the more he throws it,” said Yankees catcher Austin Wells of Schlittler’s curveball. “He’s learning how to pitch more and more every time he goes out there.” Over the last four-plus years, Schlittler has gone from a mid-round draft pick with middling velocity to the presumptive AL Cy Young winner because of his overpowering three-fastball mix and precise command. He now routinely reaches triple-digit velocities with two of those fastballs, the four-seamer and the sinker, and sits mid-90s with the other, a sharp-breaking cutter. Those three heaters are hard for hitters to handle because of their distinct movement profiles. His four-seamer gets 16.9 inches of rise, while his cutter moves an average of 5.7 inches to the glove side and his sinker tails 13.6 inches to the arm side. When he’s going strong, as he was pretty much all season, Schlittler can attack the entire zone with three pitches that look the same coming out of the hand before taking off in wildly different directions. That’s more than enough to overwhelm opponents, especially those who haven’t seen much of Schlittler, who just finished his first full big league season. But the Red Sox are no longer unfamiliar with him — six times in less than a year is a lot — and at some point, other teams won’t be either. He’s already made seven career appearances against the Blue Jays, including one playoff game, and Monday night will mark his sixth start against the Rays. And while it’s true that Schlittler has been especially dominant against the Red Sox — he’s allowed a total of seven runs, two earned, across 38 2/3 innings, good for a 0.47 ERA — those numbers don’t tell the full story. Four of those seven runs came in Schlittler’s June 25 start at Fenway Park, his only loss so far against Boston. All four were unearned, following an error by third baseman Amed Rosario, when a 112.8-mph grounder went under his glove and rolled all the way to the wall; Schlittler then allowed a sac fly and a two-run homer. Those runs wouldn’t have scored if Rosario had fielded the scorcher, but Schlittler certainly had a hand in what happened next. He threw one curveball in that start, out of 92 total pitches. His other 91 offerings were fastballs: 39 four-seamers, 37 cutters, and 15 sinkers. The average velocities of those three types of heaters were 98.4 mph for the four-seamer, 95.7 for the cutter, and 98.7 for the sinker — a range of three miles per hour. All the Red Sox had to worry about was the location and movement profile of each pitch; they could cheat a bit to catch up to the heat because they knew they wouldn’t see anything soft. So, after that outing, which was the first matchup of a four-game series in which the Red Sox swept the Yankees and began their improbable comeback from 14 games below .500 to the playoffs, Schlittler decided to start implementing his curveball more — and that required getting more comfortable throwing it. The thing is, the only way to get comfortable throwing a pitch is by throwing it, in bullpen sessions but also in games. Schlittler said after Game 1 that it took until his start against the White Sox on July 29 for his curveball to click. That night, 19 of his 93 pitches were curves (20.4%). He induced eight swings, seven of which were whiffs, and allowed no balls in play. He stayed committed to the curve in his next start, one of his worst of the season, when he allowed four runs, four hits, and five walks in three innings against the Cardinals. He threw 14 curveballs out of 83 pitches (16.9%), but he got just five swings, no whiffs, and only one called strike with it. It would have been easy to abandon the curveball there, to go back to throwing mostly fastballs, but he stuck with it. Schlittler dropped his usage rate a bit his next time out, throwing 11 curves out of 96 pitches (11.5%), but it was also his first career start against the Braves, so it made sense for him to go heavy on the heat. But then he made two starts against the Blue Jays in less than a week, throwing 11.3% curves in the first and 15.6% in the second. Notably, he’d already faced Toronto twice earlier in the season, on May 20, when five of his 106 pitches were curves (4.7%), and on June 13, when he threw just three curves and 101 total pitches (3.0%). His most recent start against Boston prior to Game 1 followed those final two matchups with the Blue Jays. On August 28 at Yankee Stadium, Schlittler carved up the Red Sox over 5 2/3 scoreless innings, allowing two hits and striking out six, though he also walked five. His 13.7% curveball usage rate (14 of 102 pitches) was his highest against the Red Sox to that point, and he caught them off guard with it. They took four curves for strikes and swung at three others, whiffing twice. Still, his other 88 pitches were one of the three heaters, so when the Red Sox stepped in against him last week, they weren’t expecting to see so many curves. Schlittler revealed his first curveball of Game 1 on his fifth pitch of the game, in a 1-2 count to Roman Anthony. After four straight four-seamers, Schlittler ripped off a filthy late-breaking curve that hit the dirt before the plate. Not wanting to get beat by the heat, Anthony started early and tried to hold up but failed. Schlittler threw two curves to the next batter, Adley Rutschman, who took the first for a called strike and fouled off the second, part of a 10-pitch at-bat that ended when the Boston catcher served a sinker into shallow left-center for a single. Schlittler then got Willson Contreras to swing through a first-pitch four-seamer before making him look silly on two looping curves that dove below the zone. When Contreras batted for the second time, with one out in the fourth inning, Schlittler started him out with four four-seamers. Contreras took them all, with alternating balls and strikes bringing the count to 2-2. The curve had to be coming, right? Nope. Schlittler went with another four-seamer, a ball up and in. OK, now the curve was coming. Wrong again. A sixth four-seamer. This one was over the heart of the plate, but again Contreras didn’t swing. It looked like he was sitting curve. “It’s the way he’s using it in his arsenal,” Yankees righty Will Warren told me. “He’s playing that cat-and-mouse game. He’s not a dumb pitcher. He knows what he’s doing out there. He and Wells have a good rhythm to the game. They’re like, ‘Alright, this guy, I think we can go breaking ball here because he’s selling out for 100.’ You get a chase, you make somebody [look] dumb. Or it’s like, ‘This guy doesn’t stand a chance on curveball 0-0; let me land this for a quick strike.’ And then he’s got it in the back of his mind like, ‘Is he gonna throw that again?’ And they swing at a fastball at their head because they’re scared they’ll get beat by the curveball, and then, ‘Oh crap, it’s not a curveball.’ “I think that’s what’s developed, and that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing. It’s just like the feel for the game and when to throw certain pitches in certain spots to certain hitters.” This is the type of development that can only happen at the major league level, and it happens out of necessity. Once Schlittler mastered the three-fastball mix in the minors, he didn’t need to throw anything else to get minor league hitters out. Why would he ever throw something else? That pretty much continued for the better part of this season, as he emerged as the ace of the best Yankees starting staff in at least a quarter century. “But these are big league hitters, so they’re going to make adjustments to you,” Warren said. “So, it’s like, how do you make small adjustments to continue progressing on that same trajectory?” Schlittler faced the Rays once since that one-curve outing against Boston. On September 24, after the Yankees had locked up the AL’s no. 4 seed, he made his final start of the season, a truncated three-inning, 70-pitch tune-up. Ten of those 70 pitches (14.3%) were curves, his second-highest total and usage rate of the pitch against the Rays in his career; he threw 18 curves out of 95 pitches (18.9%) on August 20, 2025, when he went 6 2/3 innings, gave up no runs, one hit and two walks, and struck out eight. Of course, it’s entirely possible, even probable, that Schlittler will not throw 32 curveballs on Monday against the Rays. Wells told me that he and Schlittler didn’t go into last week’s start against the Red Sox expecting to throw so many curves. “I thought it looked great in the bullpen, and his command was great. Went in the first inning with it, and it was great, so I was like, why not keep rolling with it?” the catcher said. “I think it was more so what looked good. Because we didn’t come in with that game plan.” Warren, Wells, and Rodón all stressed that Schlittler is mostly throwing the same curveball that he was before. He hasn’t made any major tweaks to improve it. Instead, they said the difference is that Schlittler is way more confident in it and understands how to leverage it. Knowing how to leverage it is the key, because even if Schlittler doesn’t throw as many curveballs against Tampa Bay, the fact that he just leaned on the pitch so much in his previous start — and that it was so effective — will force the Rays hitters to question whether it might be the next pitch they see. Along with his already-nasty stuff, that uncertainty, his teammates say, should make Schlittler even more dangerous moving forward. “I think some days it’s better than others,” Wells said. “I think some days he has a better feel for it than others. I think the development of it is just the more consistent it’s getting. I think he just has more confidence in it. To me, it’s not that it’s getting better, I think he’s getting better.”