Right now, the Yankees feel like an on-again, off-again team, and a huge reason for that has to do with the backend of their rotation. Will Warren is a young starter who still hasn’t clicked in the big leagues, while Carlos Carrasco is a veteran who doesn’t have anything left in the tank. The Yankees cannot stomach two pitchers who are providing ineffective starts while simultaneously taxing their bullpen.
If the Yankees could get more competitive performances in the back half of their rotation, they could be in a far more advantageous situation in an American League East that has stumbled out of the gate. It doesn’t seem like they have internal options, but this could be the aggressive plan that provides a much-needed jolt in their pitching staff.
Cam Schlittler Should Get A Sudden Promotion From Double-A
The production from Carlos Carrasco this season has been abysmal, as the veteran struggles to pitch deep into games, rack up strikeouts, or limit damage contact. He’s not a productive starter at this stage of his career, and the Yankees need to shuffle him out of the starting five since his upside is limited and he has an arsenal that doesn’t translate well in a reliever role.
Cam Schlittler is currently one of the top starters in the Eastern League, and while he may not be a finished product, the right-hander’s superior fastball velocity and pitch arsenal give him more upside than the aging Carrasco. His fastball averages about 16 inches of IVB but is released from a high slot and a high arm angle, which reduces the pitch’s deceptive nature, making it less prone to picking up whiffs.
The unique shape of Schlittler’s fastball does come with an advantage, as it has some cutting action to go with its aforementioned vertical movement, making it a cut-ride fastball. A heater with that kind of shape is naturally better at damage suppression than the average four-seam fastball, and that can help a young pitcher attack the zone consistently and generate weak batted balls, which the defense can convert into outs.
Using Cam Schlittler’s specific fastball shape, which ranges between 15-16 inches of Induced Vertical Break with 1-2 inches of Horizontal Break, we can compare how four-seamers with that shape perform compared to the average.
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To clarify, those aren’t the damage rates that Cam Schlittler allowed on his four-seamer last season or this season, but rather the damage rates allowed by four-seamers with his pitch shape. This data is from 2015-2025, giving us a large sample size to reasonably conclude that these fastball shapes limit damage contact better than the average fastball, but he isn’t a pitch-to-contact kind of guy.
With a 12.5% Swinging Strike% and a 27.9% K% this season, Schlittler is capable of missing bats due to his excellent secondary pitches. His sweeper has tons of lateral movement from a tall release point, which throws hitters off, as he had a 51-degree arm angle in Spring Training, which would be one of the highest arm angles for a pitcher that possesses a sweeping slider.
Only 11 MLB pitchers have an arm angle at or above 50 degrees on their sweeper (min. 100 thrown) since 2020, the first year where there’s publicly available data on arm angles. The unique nature of a sweeper from a high arm slot could make it a devastating pitch at the next level, and it’s paired with a good curveball that has tons of vertical drop, which is made even more deceptive by that aforementioned high release point.
His cutter is good at getting called strikes and soft contact as well, and he has a splitter that he’s sparingly used to try and have a pitch that moves away from left-handed batters. Schlittler’s big issue last season was that lefties performed well against him, as they posted a 1.034 OPS with a 14.8% walk rate, but this year he’s lowered his OPS against to .608 with only a 2.2% walk rate.
Cam Schlittler may not be completely MLB-ready, but his stuff far exceeds what Carlos Carrasco brings to the table, who has the fifth-lowest Stuff+ in MLB (min. 20 IP). He has to be off this pitching staff if the Yankees want to compete in games, and Schlittler provides a more competitive profile at the Major League level, even if there’s a risk of disaster. The Yankees need someone who can throw strikes and throw hard, and Cam Schlittler provides exactly that.
While the average strike rate in Double-A is around 46%, Schlittler’s strike rate is 51%, a big difference from where he was at last season and a reflection of his improved command. As a rotation, the Yankees’ average four-seam velocity of 93.5 MPH is 20th in MLB, and if they add Schlittler to replace Carrasco, that number would improve dramatically. He directly addresses two of this rotation’s biggest issues, and the learning curve could be a better experience than Carlos Carrasco is right now.
The Yankees Should Change Will Warren and Ryan Yarbrough’s Roles
So far, Will Warren has not been good enough for the Yankees, and while there are calls to have him sent down for Allan Winans, he doesn’t present much of a solution either. What would be the right call in my mind would be to convert one of the rotation spots into more of a bullpen game, since Aaron Boone already has to burn his bullpen for either Carrasco or Warren anyway.
What I’ve seen through Warren’s first seven starts this year is that he continues to make the same mistakes he made earlier in the season, with predictable pitch location and some brutal misses in-zone. He has to be more comfortable throwing his fastball inside, his sweeper away to righties, and land his changeup down-and-away to lefties instead of leaving them up where they can stay on a hitter’s swing path.
His stuff also seems to degrade as his start goes on, with fastball velocity in particular dropping from the first to the third or fourth inning by a considerable margin. These are all things that scream reliever to me, and you can draw a parallel to him and another pitcher who was thrust into a rotation spot as a rookie in Jhony Brito. He was demoted after a tough start against the Reds on May 20th, with his ERA sitting at 5.58, and he would post a 4.11 ERA in the three starts he made after being recalled in mid-June.
A brutal start against Boston on August 18th would have him permanently moved to a role where he served as a 2-3 inning weapon out of the bullpen, often following up Randy Vasquez in an outing. He would post a 1.40 ERA and 2.59 FIP in nine appearances, impressing the Padres enough in that role to become a key part of the Juan Soto blockbuster trade later that winter.
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Utilizing Will Warren in that role could benefit the right-hander, allowing him to work in shorter spurts while putting less pressure on the bullpen on his scheduled throw days. He could follow up Ryan Yarbrough, who has displayed competency in a long relief role thanks to his funky arm angles and wide array of pitches. These two pitchers also have dramatically different arsenals and profiles, making them a good match for an opener and bulk guy situation.
As for the complications that could potentially arise from using a bullpen game, they’re all issues the Yankees already deal with due to their roster’s current limitations. They have to keep Ryan Yarbrough as a bulk guy that can save the bullpen from a short start by Will Warren, so using him every fifth day wouldn’t alter Boone’s bullpen availability much. I also don’t see how it would overtax a bullpen that already gets relied on a ton because Carrasco and Warren have struggled.
If you’re going to rely on your bullpen a lot, you might as well win games while doing it, and this puts the team in a better position to win games. It also potentially provides Will Warren with an opportunity to carve out a role on this team when the rotation is healthy, as if he proves to be a reliable multi-inning reliever, he could stick on the roster for years and get another shot to start again down the road.
Jhony Brito, Clarke Schmidt, and Michael King all went through that multi-inning reliever phase, and while Brito never had the starting success the other two had, he was still a productive Yankee. I’d rather get 2-3 innings of scoreless baseball over 4-5 innings of four-run baseball from Will Warren, and it’s a lot harder to stomach the rough stages of a starter’s development while Carlos Carrasco is also getting the ball every fifth day.