If you’re a Red Sox fan, Tuesday night’s Wild Card opener was the kind of game you’ll want to forget — and the kind of game Yankees fans will bring up for years.

New York beat Boston 9-0, turning a tense playoff matchup into a rout. Cam Schlittler threw 6 1/3 scoreless innings and struck out 10. Ben Rice went 4-for-5 with two home runs, a double, and six RBIs. Together, they made the Yankees’ first step toward October glory look almost effortless.

The cruelest part? Both of them came from Boston’s backyard.

Schlittler grew up in Walpole and pitched at Northeastern. Rice grew up in Cohasset, a South Shore town about 25 miles from Fenway, and played high school ball at Noble and Greenough in Dedham.

Boston helped shape them. New York found them. Then, in the biggest game of the season, the Yankees sent them back into the rivalry carrying heavy machinery.

A Pitcher With Boston in His Rearview Mirror

Schlittler did the quieter damage first — if 101 mph fastballs can really be called quiet. He struck out the side in the first and had eight punchouts before Boston even came out for the fifth. The Red Sox managed just two hits and a walk against him. He piled up 24 swings and misses, threw 77 strikes on a career-high 117 pitches, and left in the seventh to a standing ovation and MVP chants.

That kept the game in the kind of tight, miserable range where one mistake could flip everything. The Yankees led just 1-0 through four innings. Rice changed that in the fifth, launching a home run to straightaway center and dropping it into Monument Park.

Ben Rice Turns the Lights Out

He added an RBI single in the seventh. Then he came up with the bases loaded in the eighth and ended the suspense for good, sending a grand slam into the Yankees’ bullpen.

Four hits. Eleven total bases. Six RBIs, tying the franchise record for a postseason game. He was a triple short of the cycle, because apparently he hadn’t done enough already.

The Yankees scored nine runs without Aaron Judge, who was left off the Wild Card roster because of a strained right calf. Judge played only 66 games this season after missing more than three months with a fractured rib, too. For years, taking him out of the Yankees’ lineup felt a little like pulling the engine out of a car and asking whether the cupholders could somehow get it home.

Tuesday, Rice was the engine.

That’s the part of this story that goes beyond one very ugly night for the Red Sox. Rice and Schlittler weren’t just two local kids who happened to beat Boston. They were the players who kept New York’s season moving while the Yankees’ stars kept disappearing.

Rice finished the regular season with 41 home runs, 97 RBIs, and an .897 OPS. Schlittler went 14-6 with a 1.95 ERA, and 239 strikeouts over 193 2/3 innings. They became first-time All-Stars together in July. By the time October rolled around, Rice was the Yankees’ most dependable source of power, and Schlittler was their Game 1 starter, ahead of a rotation that included Gerrit Cole and Max Fried.

That would’ve sounded ridiculous when either of them was drafted.

The Long Road From New England to October

Rice was the 363rd player picked in 2021. His Dartmouth career lasted just 30 games because the pandemic wiped out the 2020 season and the Ivy League canceled 2021 altogether. With no normal college season to play, he helped organize workouts and makeshift games at the New England Baseball Complex in Northborough.

Sometimes there were umpires. Sometimes Rice or one of the coaches called balls and strikes. It was part baseball league, part extended audition, and part refusal to let his career disappear during lockdown.

And it worked because Matt Hyde was watching.

Hyde, the Yankees’ Northeast area scout, saw the left-handed power and the initiative it took to create real baseball when real baseball was taken away. Yankees scouting director Damon Oppenheimer also happened to be spending a lot of time in Massachusetts because his son was playing junior hockey nearby. He saw Rice over and over, too.

Other teams saw an Ivy League catcher with almost no recent college track record. The Yankees saw enough to use a 12th-round pick and give him a $125,000 signing bonus.

Rice then became the kind of prospect who kept making people rethink him. He moved from catcher to first base without completely abandoning his catching work. He broke out across three minor-league levels in 2023. He was called up to New York in 2024 and immediately introduced himself to the rivalry by becoming the first Yankees rookie ever to hit three homers in a game — against Boston, naturally.

He hit 26 homers in 2025, even with an ordinary-looking .255 batting average that didn’t show how consistently hard he was hitting the ball. This year, the results finally caught up with the underlying numbers. Forty-one homers later, “Benny Barrels” isn’t just a fun nickname for an interesting young hitter anymore. He’s the reason the Yankees can survive without Judge.

One Fan Was Born for This Rivalry

Rice’s relationship with this rivalry was settled long before the Yankees drafted him. He grew up rooting for New York in a town full of Red Sox fans, mostly because he idolized Derek Jeter. When he was five, he took a tour of Fenway Park wearing a Yankees jacket and wrote “Yankees Rule” on the Pesky Pole.

Schlittler’s path came with a different kind of irony. He grew up a Red Sox fan and was named after Bruins legend Cam Neely. At Northeastern, he was a 6-foot-6 right-hander who usually sat around 92 or 93 mph. The Yankees saw the size and the chance that there might be more in there.

They waited until the seventh round to take him, which tells you they didn’t exactly know what they had. Oppenheimer has admitted as much:

"If we did know, then there’s no way in heck we’re waiting until the seventh round to take him.”

The Red Sox had pick No. 219. They took TCU right-hander Caleb Bolden.

The Yankees took Schlittler at No. 220.

That doesn’t mean Boston’s scouts committed some unforgivable crime. All 30 teams passed on Schlittler multiple times, including New York. Later-round picks become stars because projection is hard and player development can make all the difference.

The better question is how the Yankees managed to turn their projection into this.

The Yankees Built More Than a Draft Pick

Schlittler showed up to pro baseball with plenty of room to fill out and plenty to learn about his fastball. The Yankees put him through their pitching lab, the one players call the “Gas Station,” where high-speed cameras, motion tracking and force plates helped clean up his lower-half mechanics. The development staff also helped him sharpen his pitches. He got stronger, added velocity, and developed a cutter that gave hitters another fastball-looking problem to deal with.

By 2024, he was the South Atlantic League Pitcher of the Year. By July 2025, he was in the majors. Three months later, he was standing on the mound at Yankee Stadium with New York’s season in his hands and Boston waiting in the other dugout.

He threw eight scoreless innings with 12 strikeouts and no walks in the deciding game of last year’s Wild Card Series, becoming the first pitcher in postseason history to put together that line. He hit 100 mph 11 times and sent the Red Sox home.

Tuesday was the sequel.

Across his two postseason starts against the Red Sox, Schlittler's now thrown 14 1/3 scoreless innings, allowed seven hits, walked one, and struck out 22. Boston's had two Octobers to figure out a pitcher who grew up watching this team and went to college in their city.

It hasn’t gone especially well.

The Young Talent Makes the Yankees Even More Dangerous

None of this means the Yankees have suddenly become a scrappy little operation running on scouting reports and vending-machine money. Their 2026 payroll is still north of $300 million. Cole, Fried, Giancarlo Stanton, and Cody Bellinger didn’t come from some Bronx sandlot. This is still the Yankees. They’re going to spend, and everyone’s going to complain about it.

But there’s a real difference between buying the entire foundation and using money to build around one.

For much of Judge’s career, New York tried to surround their one homegrown superstar with outside names. Some helped. Others got old, got hurt, or just never really became what the Yankees paid for. The internal wave everyone hoped would show up around Judge never really did. Gary Sánchez and Luis Severino flashed, but neither could sustain it. Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, and Jasson Domínguez haven’t become stars.

Rice and Schlittler have.

Their emergence doesn’t take away the Yankees’ advantages. It makes them even more dangerous. A $300 million roster is one thing. A $300 million roster with a homegrown, cost-controlled ace and a 41-homer bat is something else entirely. Now the money can fix smaller problems instead of being asked to create the team’s entire identity from scratch.

That’s what Tuesday felt like. Not a franchise walking away from their old habits, but one realizing they don't have to rely on them for everything.

The Yankees came into October without Judge and handed the ball to a seventh-round pick from Walpole. Their biggest swings came from a 12th-round pick from Cohasset.

Boston made them.

New York weaponized them.

All stats courtesy of MLB.com.

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