NEW YORK — Cam Schlittler’s MVP claim has ignited a question that is older than analytics, older than the video room. Even older than most of the men now debating it.
What does value actually mean? A former Yankees ace dragged that argument back into the open this week, with a pitcher almost nobody expected to be in it.
Most of the sport has settled into a tidy split. One trophy for the best pitcher, another for the best hitter. Yankees fans have watched voters lean that way for more than a decade.
Can 25-year-old Schlittler buck the trend?
One national insider stated the case plainly. He studied the field, called the pick clear, and pointed to a slugger in Houston. Case closed, in his telling.
A pinstriped voice refused to let it close that easily.
Schlittler’ s first full season has produced the best ERA in baseball. David Cone, the former Yankees pitcher and current broadcaster, pushed back on the assumption that the AL MVP is a foregone conclusion. His argument was not about numbers. It was about the word itself.
An insider calls the pick obvious
The framing Cone challenged came from The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal. In a clip shared on Sept. 14, one day after Cam Schlittler tossed six scoreless innings against the Mets, Rosenthal acknowledged the right-hander’s case before setting it aside.
Rosenthal pointed to Houston’s Yordan Alvarez and the offensive season voters traditionally reward, a direct counter to the Yankees case. Alvarez entered the week hitting .310 with 38 home runs, 96 RBIs and a 1.016 OPS while chasing the AL Triple Crown.
“Yordan Alvarez, to me, seems to be the obvious choice because of what he’s accomplished offensively,” Rosenthal said.
That is the conventional read. It is also the read Cone set out to complicate.
A Yankees great reframes the word
Cone made his stand on a New York Post show alongside Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman. Rather than argue statistics, he returned to the oldest test the award offers, the one about subtraction. What does a team lose without a player?
Cone ran the exercise across the field. He asked where the Royals would be without Bobby Witt Jr., where the Astros would be without Alvarez, and where the Yankees would be without their ace. In his view, that put Schlittler in the same tier as the hitters.
“If you took Schlittler off the Yankees this year, where would they be?” Cone asked. “Schlittler’s right up there. He deserves, definitely, strong consideration.”
The point carries weight given the season the Yankees endured. Aaron Judge played just 65 games because of injury, and Gerrit Cole, Max Fried and Carlos Rodon all lost time. Through the churn, Schlittler was the constant atop the rotation, a first-year starter carrying a contender.
The metric that keeps him in the room
Here is the detail that keeps Cone’s argument alive, and one few outlets have pushed to the front. ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle runs a catch-all rating called AXE, and in his September awards check it placed Schlittler second in the entire AL MVP field. Alvarez led at 146.9. Schlittler sat right behind at 143.0.
That is not a distant also-ran. It is a near-dead heat in a model built to fold pitching and hitting into one number, and it keeps the Yankees ace on the board. Doolittle still called it an uphill climb.
The math explains why. Doolittle laid out a near-perfect chain of events. Schlittler would likely need at least one more start, probably a long one without allowing a run, and to claim the major league ERA title outright rather than just the AL lead.
Even a flawless finish would not be enough alone. Alvarez would also have to lose the Triple Crown while the Astros miss the playoffs, and Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero would need a poor final week that drops the Rays from the AL East lead. The path is nearly impossible, which is what makes Doolittle’s willingness to rank Schlittler so notable.
A stat line that forces the debate
The surrounding numbers explain why he is mentioned at all. Schlittler is 14-6 with a 1.95 ERA, 228 strikeouts, a 0.90 WHIP and 7.1 bWAR across 31 starts. His 1.95 mark is tied with Milwaukee’s Jacob Misiorowski for the best ERA in baseball.
The record-book context is sharper. Schlittler’s 21 starts allowing one run or none are a single-season Yankees mark, according to MLB.com’s Sarah Langs. That is not a hot month. It is seven months of near-total control from a first-year arm.
He has been even better lately, with a 0.86 ERA this month as he pushes past 180 innings. Multiple outlets list him as the AL leader in Baseball-Reference WAR, the exact metric that measures the value Cone described. His ERA also ranks among the lowest by a Yankees starter since Ron Guidry’s 1.74 in 1978.
A vote that turns on a definition
History frames the stakes. Justin Verlander in 2011 is the last full-time pitcher to win AL MVP, and Clayton Kershaw in 2014 is the last pitcher to win it in either league. No full-time Yankees pitcher has claimed the award since Spud Chandler in 1943.
That is why this back-and-forth matters beyond one name. Rosenthal reads value through production. Cone reads it through absence. Both are defensible, and no ballot will resolve which is correct.
The Yankees, bound for October, would rather their ace save his best work for the postseason regardless of hardware. But with a start or two left, Schlittler still has room to nudge the argument. For now, it stays open, with a Yankees great insisting the oldest question in the sport still deserves an answer.
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