Cam Schlittler has been the best story on the Yankees pitching staff all year, and on July 19 he decided to prove it against the best lineup in baseball. Facing Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and the rest of the Dodgers in the opener of a split doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, the 25-year-old righty came out throwing molten lava and didn't let up for four-plus innings.
The betting market had already circled Schlittler's strikeout upside before first pitch.
That prop got smoked almost immediately. Schlittler opened the game by blowing 99, 99 and 100 mph fastballs past Ohtani for a strikeout to lead off the game, the kind of at-bat that makes a stadium go quiet and a Twitter timeline go loud.
Schlittler's opening sequence to Ohtani, all triple digits.
He didn't stop there. Mixing that upper-90s heat with a cutter that's become his second weapon, Schlittler carved through the Dodgers order start to finish, racking up swing-and-miss after swing-and-miss against a lineup that entered the day as one of the most feared in the sport.
Schlittler's eighth strikeout through four innings, part of an outing that had him at 88 pitches by the fourth.
Schlittler finished with 8 strikeouts and zero walks across 4.1 innings before his pitch count caught up with him, a workload that also underscores just how hard he was working for every out. It's the latest data point in a breakout year that's already landed him his first All-Star nod, with a sub-2.00 ERA through his first 16 starts that's drawn comparisons to Whitey Ford's Yankee record books. Even in an outing where his own offense couldn't back him up and the Dodgers pulled away behind a dominant complete game from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Schlittler's stuff was the headline.
The final score won't show up on his stat line, but the swings-and-misses will. For a Yankees team that's leaned on Schlittler as an emergency ace after Gerrit Cole went down, this is exactly the kind of start that validates the promotion — and gives FanDuel bettors one more reason to keep chasing his strikeout props every time he takes the ball against elite competition.