If you weren’t familiar with Cam Schlittler before this season, I’m sure you are now. The 25-year-old owns an AL-leading 1.35 ERA across nine starts. The Yankees are 7-2 in his outings, and opposing batters are hitting .176 against the righty and his devastating three-fastball mix. With Tarik Skubal on the shelf, Schlittler has emerged as an early frontrunner to start for the AL All-Stars this summer in Philadelphia. Some might tell you he’s the Cy Young favorite, too. But Schlittler isn’t the only reason the Yankees’ starting staff has exceeded expectations in 2026.
Will Warren, 27 next month, has a 3.42 ERA through nine starts of his own. With 59 strikeouts, he’s tied with Schlittler for fourth-most in the American League. His 5-1 record also matches Schlittler’s, as does New York’s 7-2 record in his starts. Under the hood, the numbers are just as impressive. Warren ranks among the AL’s top 10 qualified arms in xERA and FIP, while his xFIP and SIERA put him into the league’s top five. The only AL pitchers ahead of him in all four metrics are Schlittler, Dylan Cease, and Jacob deGrom.
One thing all of those “ERA estimators” appreciate is the significance of strikeouts, walks, and their relationship to one another. Warren’s strikeout rate is up from 24.1% in 2025, his first full season, to 29.8% in 2026. His walk rate has dropped by nearly one third, from 9.1% to 6.1%. Accordingly, his 23.7% K-BB% (strikeout rate minus walk rate) is more than 10 percentage points higher than the league average for a starting pitcher. K-BB% is a stat that stabilizes relatively quickly. It’s also one of the strongest predictors of future run prevention. Warren still needs to prove he can pitch this well over a full season, but his much-improved K-BB% is a powerful indicator that his early success is more than smoke and mirrors. Schlittler is turning heads with a 24.8% K-BB% after 202 batters faced. As far as strikeouts and walks are concerned, Warren has been almost equally excellent in a similar-sized sample.
It isn’t hard to see that Warren has been pitching better than he was last year. It’s a little harder to understand how and why. His strikeouts are up and his walks are down, but he isn’t throwing substantially more pitches in the strike zone or generating more swings. His swing-and-miss rate is middle of the pack, while his chase rate is well below league average. Even more curiously, his strikeout and whiff rates are down on his sweeper, which was widely considered his bread and butter in his prospect days. When Warren put up a 4.44 ERA in 33 starts last season, many were quick to note that he did so despite opponents hitting .336 with a .569 slug against his supposed “best pitch.” Instead of being a weapon, it was the least effective sweeper in the game, with a run value of -10, per Baseball Savant. So, it would have made perfect sense to presume that Warren needed to harness his sweeper if he was going to take the next step.
It would have made perfect sense, and yet… the explanation for his success isn’t that simple. Warren throws his four-seam fastball, sinker, and sweeper each about one third of the time against right-handed batters. When he doesn’t have the platoon advantage, he also mixes in a changeup and a curveball to keep lefty batters on their toes. All five of those offerings have above-average (or better) raw stuff this year, according to models like Stuff+ and PitchingBot at FanGraphs.
However, most of his pitches had good stuff last year too. What Warren has really improved in 2026, according to those models, is his command, specifically on his four-seam, sweeper, and changeup. Indeed, a glance at his heat maps will confirm that he’s been hitting his spots with those pitches more frequently. He isn’t letting his four-seam fastball drift to the sides, he’s wasting fewer sweepers, and he’s punishing opposite-handed hitters with his changeup low and away. The righty might not be throwing more pitches in the zone, but he’s throwing pitches where he needs to throw them to earn more strikes.
Just as consequential as where Warren is throwing his pitches is when and where he’s throwing them in relation to one another. In other words, all five of his pitches work in tandem. His changeup works because it plays off his sinker. His sinker works because he pairs it with his four-seam. They all work because his sweeper gives him such a different look. His arsenal is more than the sum of its parts.
To that point, Stuff+ and PitchingBot give Warren strong scores for the stuff and location of each of his individual pitches, but his overall scores – scores that take into account physical pitch characteristics, pitch locations, and situational usage for his entire arsenal – are nothing short of elite. His 118 Pitching+ (a sister metric to Stuff+) ranks third among qualified arms across MLB, trailing only stuff god deGrom and stuff prodigy Jacob Misiorowski. Warren’s overall PitchingBot score is even better, leading all 79 qualified pitchers in the major leagues. It may be just one metric, but it’s a metric that puts him ahead of names like deGrom, Skubal, Skenes… and Schlittler. Pitching+ and PitchingBot aren’t stats you hear about every day, but they’re powerful tools for predicting rest-of-season runs allowed in smaller samples. When all is said and done, what matters is preventing runs and winning ballgames. The pitch models tell us that Warren has the skills to do exactly that.
Gerrit Cole has been out all season. Carlos Rodón only just returned. If Clarke Schmidt pitches at all this year, it won’t be until the latter half of the schedule. Luis Gil is hurt too, and even before he landed on the Triple-A injured list, he was pitching like something was wrong. Those four pitchers made up the Yankees’ rotation as recently as the 2024 World Series. Yet, even without meaningful contributions from any of them, New York’s starters lead the Junior Circuit in wins, xERA, and FanGraphs WAR. Their 3.14 ERA ranks second, and their 16.5% K-BB% ranks third. Not all of that is Warren’s doing – he’s had plenty of help from Schlittler, Max Fried, and Ryan Weathers – but it would be hard to overstate how much he has meant to his team so far in 2026. Cole, Fried, Rodón, and now Schlittler are much bigger names, but Warren is looking like another future ace for New York.
Photos courtesy of Maria Lysaker, Imagn Images.
