The Yankees didn't need Aaron Judge on Tuesday night. They needed two guys nobody wanted enough, a seventh-round pick from Northeastern and a 12th-rounder from Dartmouth, both raised within an hour of Fenway Park, both apparently sent to Earth for the sole purpose of humiliating the team they grew up rooting against professionally. Cam Schlittler threw 6⅓ scoreless innings. Ben Rice drove in six runs on a grand slam and two homers. The final was 9-0, the largest shutout win in Yankees postseason history since 1960, and the two guys responsible for it grew up close enough to have driven to each other's Little League games.
That's not a coincidence worth a passing mention. It's the actual story.
The draft round doesn't measure what actually wins in October
Schlittler went in the seventh round. Rice went in the 12th. Neither came out of a baseball factory program; they came out of Northeastern and Dartmouth, schools that exist in scouting reports as afterthoughts, not sources. One year apart, both wildly overlooked, both now standing at the center of a Yankees postseason run that doesn't have Judge in the lineup and barely needs him.
Schlittler is the runaway favorite for the AL Cy Young after a 1.95 ERA and 239 strikeouts across 193⅔ innings in his first full big league season. Against Boston specifically, he's now a horror story: two earned runs in 38⅔ career innings against the Red Sox, a 0.47 ERA, 49 strikeouts across six starts. This wasn't a fluke start. It's a pattern against the exact team that didn't want him.
Rice put up 41 homers this year, eight more than his first two big league seasons combined, and an .897 OPS while quietly holding together an offense that lost Judge and Giancarlo Stanton for most of the year. Tuesday he went 4-for-5, becoming the sixth player in major league history, and the first Yankee ever, to log at least four hits and six RBIs in a single postseason game. He outhit the entire Red Sox lineup by himself, four hits to three.
The curveball is the separator, not the fastball
Schlittler built his season on three fastball variations up in the zone paired with a curveball he buries below it, and during the regular season he only leaned on that curveball 9.8% of the time for a 44.2% whiff rate. Tuesday he nearly tripled the usage to 27% and the whiff rate jumped to 57%. That's not a pitcher getting lucky. That's a pitcher identifying the one weapon that was working and refusing to let Boston's lineup adjust to it.
He threw 117 pitches, the most by a Yankee in a postseason game since CC Sabathia in 2012, and racked up a career-high 24 swing-and-misses before Aaron Boone finally pulled him after a leadoff single in the seventh. Boone admitted afterward he probably let it go a batter too long. Nobody in that stadium was complaining. The Yankee Stadium crowd gave a pitcher MVP chants in October, which does not happen for someone striking out ten and touching two hits allowed unless the moment demands it.
Beating the Red Sox specifically is the whole point
Both of these guys could have ended up wearing Boston's uniform, geographically speaking, and instead they're burying the Red Sox in the building that used to be their nightmare. Rice said it plainly: he'll remember beating the Red Sox specifically, more than the historic stat line. Schlittler has openly said the hostility from the fanbase he grew up inside of fuels him. This isn't two guys who happened to have a big night. It's two hometown kids who got passed over, ended up in pinstripes, and are now making a living off making Boston pay for it every time the calendar hits October.
The Yankees are getting Cy Young caliber pitching and MVP-caliber offense from a Northeastern arm and a Dartmouth bat, and both of them are doing their best work specifically against the team from their own backyard. Judge's absence should be the headline. Instead the Bronx has two better ones, and neither was supposed to be here at all.
