Yankees righthander Clarke Schmidt eager to make his 2025 debut Wednesday against Royals
Yankees' Clarke Schmidt looks on from the dugout during an MLB baseball game against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, April 13, 2025. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Clarke Schmidt made his major league debut for the Yankees in 2020, so he has been around long enough to know how things work around here.
He expects fans will be pleased to see him on Wednesday night when he makes his 2025 debut against the Royals, given the starting rotation’s early struggles.
And knows that they will be less pleased if he is not up to the challenge.
“If you don’t [succeed], you get booed,” he told Newsday with a laugh before Tuesday night’s game against Kansas City.
But that sort of pressure does not intimidate him. Quite the opposite.
“Obviously, playing in New York for a few years, you know the deal,” he said. “But that’s the great part about playing in New York. It’s very fun.”
Schmidt, a 29-year-old righty, is more than ready for some big league fun after he was sidelined by right shoulder tendinitis in mid-March.
“I’m eager to get back out there and compete,” he said. “It’s something that I’ve been looking forward to. Obviously a little bit of a delay, but excited to get out there.”
Max Fried started Tuesday night’s game with a 2-0 record and 1.56 ERA, but with Gerrit Cole out for the season and Luis Gil out at least until June, the rotation has been shaky.
Schmidt can help fix that if he pitches like he did down the stretch in 2024.
Schmidt was 5-5 with a 2.85 ERA in 2024 but missed three months with a right lat strain. He was the loser in Game 3 of the World Series, allowing three runs while walking four in 2 2/3 innings against the Dodgers.
“We’re counting on Clarke,” manager Aaron Boone said before Tuesday’s game. “We expect a lot from Clarke now . . . We have a lot of confidence in what he brings and how good of a pitcher he is and has become and feel like he’s in good place right now in his buildup and what the last month or so has been.”
Aaron Judge said of Schmidt, “He’s been a guy who’s fun to watch him grow, just from his feel for his pitches, how he attacks guys . . . There were a lot of walks (early in his career), a lot of inconsistency.
“Now the control is there. He’s always had the nasty stuff. I think he’s learned a lot being around Gerrit Cole, learned how to navigate a lineup . . . It’s just been fun to see him develop as a pitcher and kind of grow from a guy with a lot of great potential and great stuff, obviously, to one of our better starters down the stretch last year.”
Schmidt said he felt good about his two starts with Double-A Somerset.
On Thursday, he threw four scoreless innings with four strikeouts, no walks and four hits allowed. On April 5, he struck out seven in 3 1/3 scoreless innings.
“When you’re doing those, you’re trying to hit the health check marks and we did that and then kind of treat it like a spring training where you’re just building up and just getting your pitches up,” he told Newsday.
“It felt really good physically. I thought the stuff was good. I was throwing strikes and getting into my areas. Those were the things I was trying to accomplish.”
Is he looking forward to pitching and boosting the rotation?
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “I have full confidence in these guys that everybody’s going to figure it out. Obviously, it’s very early. But I think being able to help the guys and hopefully bolster the rotation is very exciting for me.”
Schmidt said he was not overly concerned about his initial diagnosis.
“We felt like it was just a little bit of extra soreness and a case of building early in the season,” he said, “so just small stuff you deal with when you’re building up. But I’m feeling confident in my body.”
Notes & quotes: Players on both teams wore No. 42 jerseys in honor of Jackie Robinson Day. Said Judge, “It's just kind of a humble reminder of looking back on his story and what he went through just to play this game . . . He had a lot of hate and a lot discrimination against him and still went out there, had an incredible career. So it just speaks volumes the type of hero he was.”
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
