From Judge to Rice to Schlittler, Yankees know stars can come from any round

ST. PETERSBURG -- One great find can be enough to burnish a scout’s reputation, making it worth all the highway miles and meals away from home. Matt Hyde can point to two of them.

Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler, a couple of Hyde’s prized Yankees discoveries, are representing the organization in the upcoming All-Star Game. Each punched his ticket to Philadelphia after a unique path through the club’s player development system.

Their dual emergence serves as a terrific advertisement for the Yankees’ pipeline. It also arrives at an appropriate time, with the MLB Draft right around the corner. There are other diamonds in the rough within this year’s pool, and scouts like Hyde are trying to uncover them.

Yankees director of amateur scouting Damon Oppenheimer likens the Draft to “our Christmas Day,” frequently saying that the organization aims to select the best player in every round, regardless of positional need at the big league level.

• Day 1 picks: 35, 63, 99, 127
• Bonus pool allotment: $7,342,800 (first-round pick allotment $2,826,700 dropped 10 spots for exceeding second surcharge threshold of competitive-balance tax)
• Last year’s top pick: SS Dax Kilby, 39th overall … Though he might have flown under the radar in a class of prep shortstops, Kilby quickly established himself as a Top 100 player, opening eyes by hitting .353/.457/.441 over 19 games with Single-A Tampa after signing.
• Breakout 2025 pick: Kaeden Kent, 103rd overall … The son of Hall of Famer Jeff Kent, Kaeden has the same profile as an offensive-minded infielder who fits best at second base. He struggled in his first taste of High-A late in 2025, but has been a productive contributor for Hudson Valley this season.

Over the last several years, their scouting and decision-making process has helped yield Rice, a 12th-round pick out of Dartmouth in 2021, and Schlittler, a seventh-round pick out of Northeastern in 2022.

Hyde recalls seeing Rice as “this All-American looking kid who had big left-handed raw power and was at a premium position as a catcher with makeup,” noting his initiative to organize a New England baseball league that allowed him to continue playing through the pandemic.

As for Schlittler, Hyde had eyes on him well before the right-hander traded in his Red Sox fandom to become Boston’s least favorite online troll, dating back to his days at Walpole High School in Massachusetts.

“He’s got a lot of toughness to him. He’s had to earn things,” Hyde said. “You think about a seventh-round pick that’s not a highly touted guy, and he’s always had to earn himself. He wasn’t a huge recruit; even at Northeastern, he played second fiddle to a kid named Sebastian Keane, who we also ended up signing.”

Forecasting future performance is an inexact science, and one of the best examples came in the 2013 MLB Draft. It’s easy to revisit that call in hindsight, but not only did 31 other players come off the board before Aaron Judge, but he wasn’t even the Yankees’ first selection. New York took infielder Eric Jagielo from Notre Dame at No. 26.

“It’s kind of funny now, but if you go back in time to what Eric Jagielo was doing before he got hurt and diabetes, he was a good player,” Oppenheimer said. “So the idea that you might have been able to get him and Aaron Judge, it was like, ‘Holy smokes.’

“Everybody would like to say, ‘Well, you screwed it up. You should have taken Judge first.’ But we also have old-school scouting information and relationships with Jim Hendry that knew we didn’t have to take Aaron at that point. But he definitely stands out in the history of all of our Drafts.”

It is a safe bet that the Yankees’ Draft strategy will once again tilt toward pitching this year, particularly collegiate arms. They selected seven straight pitchers to open the 2024 Draft, and though 2025 was more balanced, they took 10 pitchers to nine position players.

“You can’t win at the big league level without pitching, and pitching is from the Draft,” he said. “It comes from everywhere, from the first-round pick to the post-Draft guys. You’re finding guys that can assist a Major League rotation and a Major League bullpen. I think it’s real important that we also think we can do a great job of developing them.”