Cam Schlittler isn’t the first homegrown, hard-throwing right-hander to show up in The Bronx with elite stuff and a fearless attitude.
One of the most recent examples was back at the Stadium on Tuesday night, now an experienced player who’s had plenty of ups and downs in his career.
And Luis Severino has taken note of Schlittler, who started against Severino’s A’s on Tuesday.
“I think he’s better than where I was at the same time in my career,’’ Severino said prior to Tuesday’s 5-3 win over the A’s.
“He’s electric,” Severino said of the 25-year-old Schlittler, who received a no decision after allowing three runs in five innings. “His confidence is better than what I had.”
Severino — who will start for the A’s on Wednesday — arrived in The Bronx in August 2015, when he was just 21, and provided a boost to the rotation.
Schlittler was 24 when he got called up for the first time last July and had a similar effect on the Yankees.
“The stuff he did in the playoffs was unbelievable,’’ Severino said of Schlittler’s eight shutout innings against the Red Sox in the wild-card series. “That’s the main thing for me: You can find anybody with good stuff, but not with that mentality he has. He doesn’t care about how good a hitter you are, he’s gonna go after you. That says a lot about him.”
Severino had a famously rocky tenure with the Yankees, with the team hoping Schlittler pitches at an elite level for longer than Severino did.
Severino’s time in New York was marred by injury and disappointment.
He had a rough 2016 season and then was an All-Star the next two years — finishing in the top 10 in the AL Cy Young Award voting both seasons.
But injuries took a toll over the following seasons, and by 2023, Severino hit rock bottom on the field.
He rebounded with a strong bounce-back season with the Mets in 2024 before signing a three-year, $67 million deal with the A’s, for whom he was terrific last year on the road, but struggled at their home games in Sacramento.
Severino signed with the Yankees as an international free agent in 2011 and said at one point he “wanted to die a Yankee.”
Now 32, he understands the business of the game better.
“I wish I learned to take care of my body like I do now when I was there,’’ Severino said. “It would have been a different story. But I needed to go elsewhere to take care of myself.”
Passing the 10-year mark in the majors early this season — less than three years after he said he felt like “the worst pitcher in the game” during his disastrous 2023 campaign — was important to the right-hander.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m not gonna play anymore,’ ” Severino said. “In ’23, I was not feeling good. I was not the same. Then I left and figured out I needed to do something different to be myself again.”
The Yankees, who have seen others — like Clarke Schmidt and Luis Gil — deal with injuries and poor performance, want Schlittler to take a different trajectory.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
