NEW YORK — Most clubs spend the hours before a start trying to calm a pitcher down. Breathing work. Scouting notes. Quiet rooms.
The Yankees do something closer to the opposite with the best arm on their pitching staff.
It is not a prank and it is not a one-off. The Yankees have a person on the payroll, a title on the org chart, and a routine that runs before every outing. What that person shows Cam Schlittler is sometimes ordinary. Sometimes it is a stranger on a podcast saying he is finished.
The results have been hard to argue with, which is exactly what makes the whole thing worth examining before the second half begins.
A job title, not a locker room joke
Chad Bohling, the Yankees’ director of organizational performance, plays videos for Schlittler before every start, according to reporting by Chris Kirschner of The Athletic. That detail is the part most of the coverage has skipped past. This is not teammates needling a rookie. It is a front-office function.
Not every clip is hostile. Some are. The one that has drawn attention came from Jared Carrabis, a Red Sox fan who hosts the Baseball Is Dead podcast, who said of Schlittler that “the regression is happening before our very eyes” after a rough outing against the Detroit Tigers.
Bohling showed it to Schlittler before his July 6 start at Tampa Bay. Kirschner reported the Yankees ran the clip because they knew how he would respond. That is the sentence that separates this from ordinary motivation. The organization was not guessing. It was making a prediction about a specific pitcher’s temperament and acting on it.
What happened next
Schlittler took the ball against the AL East-leading Rays and allowed four hits and one earned run, striking out eight over eight innings in a 5-1 Yankees win. The prediction held.
Asked afterward about the clip, Schlittler did not pretend it washed over him. His answer is the clearest evidence the tactic works, and it also hints at why it might not work forever.
“It definitely pissed me off,” Schlittler told The Athletic. “It was pretty easy to go out there and perform just based on the last outing, how we’ve been playing, and then the cherry on top there.”
Read that carefully. He lists three fuel sources and the clip is the third. The bad start came first. The Yankees’ play came second. The podcast was garnish. By his own account, the video was not the engine.
Schlittler also addressed the Boston fans who have followed him since last October. He was responding to the trolling he took during his June 25 start at Fenway Park, his worst outing against them this year.
“They can say whatever they want,” Schlittler said. “But they’re not really in a position to be talking, considering how the standings are. Whatever they want to say, it’s just kind of useless. It just goes in one ear and out the other.”
Those two quotes sit awkwardly together. One says outside noise fires him up. The other says it goes in one ear and out the other. Both came from the same conversation with the same reporter.
Why the Yankees know which button to press
Schlittler grew up in Walpole, Massachusetts, a Red Sox fan, and pitched at Northeastern. The Yankees drafted him in the seventh round in 2022, 220th overall, out of that same school.
Then came last October. Schlittler allowed five hits and no runs and struck out 12 over eight innings in the Wild Card round to end Boston’s season, and a hometown kid became a villain in the place he came from. The social media response was heavy. He answered it.
That history is why the Yankees routine functions at all. Bohling is not manufacturing a grudge. He is pointing at one that already exists.
Schlittler suggested to Kirschner that he has earned the right to answer back, saying, “This year, I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring people online, but I’ve also been able to back it up, too. If I want to say something, I can, because I’ve backed it up.”
The numbers behind the noise
Schlittler is 9-5 with a 2.05 ERA, a 0.94 WHIP and 137 strikeouts across 118 2/3 innings, and he made the All-Star team in his first full season. He is 25.
He ranks first in the American League in pitcher WAR, ERA and WHIP, second in strikeouts and tied for third in wins, which puts him in the Cy Young conversation. He posted a 2.96 ERA in 14 starts as a rookie in 2025.
Against Boston in 2026 he has started three times, dominant in two and poor in one, the June 25 game at Fenway. Nothing has been reported about whether Bohling ran a clip before that start, which is the one question the whole premise turns on. A motivation tactic that precedes every outing also precedes the bad ones.
The part nobody has tested
The Yankees open the second half at 54-42, second in the AL East, three games behind Tampa Bay. Boston is the complication. The Red Sox took a nine-game winning streak into the break, climbing to 46-48 and within half a game of a Wild Card spot.
Which puts an expiration date on the quote everyone is running. The Yankees pitcher dismissed Boston fans by pointing at the standings. The standings are moving.
The two teams do not meet again until Aug. 28-30, and that series is at Yankee Stadium. New York does not return to Fenway Park in the regular season, so the only way Schlittler pitches there again this year is in October.
Nothing has been reported about whether the Yankees intend to keep running the videos, or whether Bohling adjusts what he shows as the standings tighten. What is on the record is a pitcher with a 2.05 ERA, an executive with a video library, and six weeks until the team that supplies most of the material comes to the Bronx.
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