Pitcher grows up in Boston. Pitcher gets drafted by the New York Yankees. Pitcher rises quickly to the big leagues and faces his hometown Red Sox in the playoffs. Pitcher’s dad is the police chief in a suburban Boston town, for chrissakes. This is, by all rights, the schmaltzy plot of a made-for-TV movie that airs at 4 p.m. on summer weekdays.

It’s also Cam Schlittler’s life.

The Yankees starting pitcher with the precariously pronounced last name paid off that narrative with 8 shutout innings and 12 strikeouts. Too good and clean for a movie, if we're being honest. If there were actually a dramatization crafted from his experience, it would probably not end with that masterful game. It would start with it, and it would be a darker tale.

What happened afterward is very 2020s. Schlittler, a 24-year-old man at the time who had interacted with humans before, went on X (the degrading social media disease you might remember as Twitter) and posted some of the most innocuous trash talk you’ve ever seen.

“Not this year,” he replied to a Red Sox influencer who had predicted “Sox in 3.”

“Drinking dat dirty water,” he posted, referencing the song Fenway Park plays after a Red Sox victory, summoning a version of a text almost everyone sent to that one friend in college who liked a rival team.

In postgame comments, Schlittler gave a pumped but unremarkable quote about how the noise directed at him from his hometown had motivated his performance.

“It’s personal for me,” Schlittler said. “People from Boston had a lot to say before the game, so for me, just being a silent killer, being able to go out there and shut them down. We’re aggressive back home and we’re going to try to get under people’s skins. They just picked the wrong guy to do it to — and the wrong team to do it to as well.”

Nevertheless, fans had taken to social media to harass family members, including his mother.

Schlittler starts against the Red Sox again tonight, in what will be his first major-league appearance at Fenway Park, and the headlines are what you might ruefully expect. Schlittler told reporters this week that he had received death threats, even as he downplayed the situation as an online phenomenon, saying he had spent plenty of time in Boston recently without in-person incident.

"Most normal fans could care less, right?" Schlittler said, per the New York Post’s Joel Sherman. "It's just those diehards that just have nothing else in their lives other than baseball or sports that really care about this, and the fact that I play for the Yankees makes it worse for them."

Yet if you make the mistake of logging onto X for more than a few minutes, you’ll see that his comments are fueling the worst type of fandom. Red Sox fans and even some media-adjacent people are attacking Schlittler for … taking death threats too seriously, or daring to tell a reporter about them. Yankees fans are rightfully fighting back against that ridiculous notion, but often falling into the trap of painting it as a “Red Sox fan” problem.

Everyone treating Schlittler’s situation as anything less than a human situation he doesn’t deserve to be dealing with should be embarrassed.

Threats and harassment constitute a problem in every fan base, in every sport, and in every sphere where someone could attract fans. It’s not new — Pedro Martinez wrote in his memoir that his family avoided traveling to New York for postseason games in 2003 because of threats against their safety — but it is exacerbated by the perceived permissions of social media and the anonymity of online communication. (The gambling angle of this problem is perhaps an even bigger problem for athletes now.)

No athlete just trying to do their job and entertain us should have to think about whether their on-field excellence or their candor afterward will bring real world violence to their door, or their family’s. But they all do have to think about that. Yankees manager Aaron Boone advised Schlittler to lay low on social media this week, when he could and should be soaking up the spotlight.

He enters Thursday night’s start at Fenway with a 1.95 ERA. Through five starts and 27 2/3 innings, he has struck out 36 and walked only three batters. By FanGraphs’ estimation, he has been the most valuable pitcher in baseball so far. This is a moment to look into the camera and deliver a line for the ages in an epic rivalry.

But he’ll probably steer clear this time, because he’s not in a movie. He has to walk out of the park and into the real world afterward, where too many people have lost the ability to decipher the lines between rivals and enemies.

The Bullpen

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The Mets won a game. After 12 straight losses, each one a bigger gut punch than the last, they got Juan Soto back from a calf injury and scraped together enough runs to beat the Twins. But in the process, they probably lost Francisco Lindor to a calf injury. The Mets should be studied by pessimistic theologians.

But in the meantime, the team in Queens has an optimistic theologian in Luke Weaver. The reliever, who was previously a Yankee but clearly born to be a Met, has picked up (and frankly, elevated) Pete Alonso’s mantle for strangely mesmerizing postgame quotes that could make you say Yeah! or Yeah?

So, if this team stinks, its smell is not that of fear, or something, according to Weaver.

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Of MLB’s 30 teams, 28 have at least three hitters who have racked up 50+ plate appearances with an OPS+ of 100 or better.

The two clubs that have fewer: the aforementioned Mets, of course, and the 16-9 Reds.

Cincinnati’s strong April is largely a testament to a great bullpen, but let’s talk about the offense. It has been powered almost entirely by the differently shaped duo of Sal Stewart and Elly De La Cruz.

Stewart is a nondescript looking fellow, with no obvious defensive position, who just mashes. A 22-year-old who was drafted out of high school in 2022, Stewart made mincemeat of the minors and, so far, seems poised to do the same in the majors. Between his 18-game cup of coffee in 2025 and his torrid start this season, Stewart’s MLB line goes .281/.355/.589 with 13 homers and 6 steals in 43 games. He strikes out considerably less than the average hitter and still packs all-fields power.

De La Cruz, meanwhile, is eye-catching in everything he does. His batting eye is perhaps the best explanation for his hot start. He is swinging a touch less often and making more contact when he does unleash a hack.

The Reds will need … someone, anyone else, to hit alongside them to make real run in a hotly contested NL Central, but Stewart’s bat looks foundational in a way their other young hitters’ efforts have not.

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Also helping the Reds: This Dane Myers EuroStep dodge slide, which scored a run as catcher Hunter Feduccia understandably whiffed on the tag, telling MLB.com afterward, “he kind of did a move I've never seen before.”

Manager Terry Francona said, “That was athletic. Guys could try to do that but most of them probably get hurt.”

This is now No. 1 in the unofficial power rankings of this season’s Weird Slides. Please do send along any and all slides you think might be worthy of challenging Myers for the belt.

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The Mariners had the most interesting week in reflexes.

They recorded an out on a rocket knuckleballing in center field, no match for Julio Rodriguez’s last-second adjustment.

But they did not record an out on a rocket that wound up inside Logan Gilbert’s shirt. (By rule, a ball inside a uniform is out of play, and not a catch.)

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Pirates outfielder Jake Mangum threw a ball to young fans in the stands this week in a heartwarming moment that went viral for the kids’ reactions. A young boy with a glove caught the ball and handed it over to his sister, who was wearing a Mangum jersey and immediately embraced him.

That is obviously excellent. Bookmark it for an instant reminder of “why you take your family to a baseball game.” Mangum’s reaction is also worth mentioning here.

The 30-year-old in his second big-league season came over to Pittsburgh in a trade this winter, and in that moment he was having a first brush with a gentle form of fandom.

“I saw the little girl doing this,” he said, pausing to mime the motion of pointing to her back, where his name was emblazoned. “And it was my jersey. I’m a new player here, so I think it was the first time I’ve seen my jersey in the stadium.”

It reminded me of Andrew McCutchen’s gesture almost 11 years ago now, when he jogged out to give his gloves to a couple young Pirates fans who had come to cheer him on in a road game.

That’s the dream of what fandom can inspire. For everyone involved.

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