New York Yankees pitcher Cam Schlittler is very good at baseball.

No, that isn’t a particularly hot take. In his sophomore campaign for the Evil Empire, Schlittler has taken the league by storm, posting an American League-best 1.95 ERA across nearly 200 innings. With less than two weeks to go until the end of the regular season, it looks all but inevitable that he’ll take home the AL Cy Young Award — the highest honor a pitcher can earn.

Well, unless he wins Most Valuable Player, too. But that won’t happen … right?

Following Schlittler’s latest start Sunday, in which he dominated the New York Mets in six one-hit innings, Yankees manager Aaron Boone seemed to throw the ace’s hat into the ring.

“Valuable is a good word. He might be the MVP, too,” Boone said in a postgame news conference Sunday.

Meanwhile, Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge — who, mind you, has won three MVPs in the last four years — had a slightly different view.

“He’s definitely pitching like an MVP, but they’ve got a Cy Young Award for a reason,” Judge said in a postgame interview Sunday. “He’s got my vote, definitely, for Cy Young.”

Ouch. Way to have your teammate’s back, Aaron.

Lack of hypemanship aside, though, Judge does bring up an interesting point: There’s already an award for the best pitcher in each league — do they really need to be part of the MVP conversation, too?

The simplest answer: Why wouldn’t they be? The award is called “Most Valuable Player,” not “Most Valuable Position Player.” A batter makes up only one-ninth of the offense, while a pitcher effectively takes on run prevention by himself. If anything, good pitchers might be more valuable than good hitters on a given day.

The numbers agree, at least. Schlittler currently leads the American League with 7.0 Wins Above Replacement — nearly a full win above Houston Astros designated hitter Yordan Alvarez, who I said had looked nearly guaranteed to take home MVP honors just a few weeks ago.

It’s not that simple in practice, though. Since 2020, four different pitchers have led their respective leagues in WAR; none placed higher than fourth in MVP voting. Just last year, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cristopher Sánchez led the National League with 8.1 WAR, yet 14 different players earned more votes. He didn’t even win the Cy Young!

Going back further, in the 70 years since MLB introduced the Cy Young Award, only 11 full-time pitchers have won MVP. The list is a weird one, with some all-time great seasons — shoutout to 1968 Bob Gibson — mixed in with some strange picks that, frankly, are nowhere close to MVP-caliber. Sorry, Dennis Eckersley, but a reliever with 80 innings winning MVP is absurd.

Meanwhile, some of the best pitching seasons in MLB history weren’t even close to taking the award: Pedro Martínez’s 2000 campaign was arguably the most dominant of all time, and he barely broke the top five in voting that year.

Point being: It is very, very difficult for a pitcher to win MVP — and no, Los Angeles Dodgers two-way star Shohei Ohtani doesn’t count. You either have to put up some of the greatest numbers we’ve ever seen — and even that might not be enough — or get lucky with a weak cast of position players.

Schlittler has done neither. His stats are excellent, but not exactly legendary — two other pitchers have recorded a better ERA+ in just the last two seasons — and he’s going up against Alvarez, a Triple Crown contender. It’s nice of his coach to drum up support for his MVP case, but I don’t see a world in which he wins come November.

That leads us to the inevitable final question: Should pitchers be able to win MVP at all?

If I’m being honest … I don’t think so. The role of a starting pitcher who takes the mound once a week is fundamentally different from that of a position player who starts in the lineup every day. It doesn’t make sense to compare the value of two players when there’s nothing comparable about them in the first place.

That’s not to say pitchers are inherently less valuable than hitters; as I mentioned earlier, you could argue they’re more valuable in the long run. But having them vie for the same award would be like combining the drama and comedy categories at the Emmys. And can you imagine if only one of Rhea Seehorn and Jean Smart got to go home with a trophy? Blasphemy.

Let the pitchers have the Cy Young, and the position players the MVP. Ensure that one player from each gets the recognition they deserve. If renaming the MVP to the “Mike Trout Award” would eliminate the semantic argument over the word “player,” so be it. 

“But what about Ohtani?” you cry. “He pitches and hits! If the MVP award is only for position players, wouldn’t that make it harder for him to win?”

Ohtani has four MVPs, back-to-back World Series titles and a $700 million contract. Frankly, I think he could benefit from a little adversity.

Bennett Christofferson is a senior writing about baseball’s biggest stories and controversies in his column, “Dugout Diaries,” which runs every other Thursday. He is also the managing editor at the Daily Trojan.