Clarke Schmidt sat in the Yankees’ dugout, weighing the good and the bad. It was the type of early April afternoon that gives the barest hints of an impending summer, a day when 50-something degrees feels optimistically forward-thinking.

Two days earlier, Schmidt -- who pitched mostly out of the bullpen in 2022 -- had started the Yankees’ second game of the year, slotting in for an injured Carlos Rodón, the team’s top free-agent signing. Before that appearance, Schmidt’s Baseball Reference page listed just five career starts.

He stepped to the mound wearing No. 36, a far cry from the 86 he donned as recently as Spring Training. The new number evoked images of David Cone and Jim Kaat, who wore it proudly during their pinstriped tenures. Now that Schmidt had a big league regular’s number, it was time for him to pitch like one.

And he was … OK. Pretty good, even. He looked sharp in the first inning, navigated through trouble while throwing 32 pitches in the second, and enjoyed a 1-2-3 third frame. But in the fourth, the wheels fell off. The Giants went homer-double-flyout-homer, and Schmidt’s 2023 debut was over. No one had been expecting tremendous length from a guy still stretching out as a starter, and overall, there were plenty of positives.

“There’s a lot of good takeaways as far as stuff, swings and misses, where I was as far as being able to manage the game throughout the first time through the order and stuff like that,” Schmidt said on April 3. “I’m not going to let one bad inning rattle me or take me out of the mentality I need to be in.”

Except, as April continued, it became clear that it wasn’t just one bad inning. After exiting that first start with an 8.10 ERA, he saw it climb to 9.45 the next time out. Schmidt finished the month staring at a gnarly 6.84 mark, and the plan to feature an in-depth look at a new budding star in the Yankees’ rotation in the May issue of Yankees Magazine was tabled.

Almost exactly four months after that April chat, Schmidt had no trouble picking through the wreckage of his early struggles. It helped that, from May through the first two starts of August, he had been an undeniable bright spot on the team, a solid co-pilot alongside Gerrit Cole on the latter’s quest for a first career Cy Young Award. But there’s also a part of Schmidt that would never be fazed by struggles, whether one inning on April 1 or a disastrous first month of a season. Preternaturally competitive and incredibly -- at times, exceedingly -- confident, Schmidt has proven himself well-built to persevere, to learn and to thrive.

“I felt like I was an outing away every time I went out there,” he said in August. It’s a sentiment echoed throughout the Yankees’ dugout. Assistant pitching coach Desi Druschel gave his version in April: “I feel like we’re really close to seeing what Clarke really is.” Meanwhile, four months later, catcher Kyle Higashioka summed up the journey. “Every time we’d have a tough outing,” Higashioka said, “he’d be like, ‘We’re going to figure it out,’ or, ‘We’re going to get ’em next time.’

“And then it turned into, ‘We’re getting ’em now.’”

***

Getting them now is great, but even before his April 2023 struggles, Schmidt had gotten a taste of adversity in the limelight after a mostly successful campaign in 2022 that saw him make his case in some high-leverage spots. But come October, the pendulum swung back with the force of a wrecking ball. After pitching a perfect 10th inning in Game 2 of the American League Division Series against Cleveland, he entered Game 3 with one out in the ninth, runners at the corners and the Yankees up by two runs. Just 12 pitches later, the Guardians had a 2-games-to-1 series lead.

Four days later, after advancing past Cleveland to face Houston in the ALCS, Aaron Boone called for Schmidt in the fifth inning of the opener, with the game tied and a runner on second with one out. The pitcher got out of that inning tenuously, issuing a pair of walks to load the bases before getting Kyle Tucker to ground into a double play. But he allowed a pair of solo homers in the sixth inning. In the two postseason games, his last appearances of the year, Schmidt faced 10 batters and got just four outs.

Nearly a year later, trying to explain the dramatic swing in his 2023 output, Schmidt looked back on those postseason outings, pointing out the benefits of living through a nightmare.

“I know that I failed on the world stage in the playoffs last year in front of millions of people,” he said in August. “Didn’t do my job at all. And you see the other side of that, and it’s, 'It can’t really get much worse than that.'”

That’s impressive perspective from a 27-year-old still finding his way. One of the key things to understand about the baseball hierarchy is that results impact different players in different ways. Talk to Cole after a dominant outing, and you’re likely to hear him gripe about a few bad pitches that he got away with; after a rough start, he’ll note good, competitive offerings that a batter managed to handle.

Cole has a baseball card that allows him to think about process over results -- and his process is so good that results usually follow. Schmidt doesn’t have that same leeway. Fledgling pitchers are judged -- by fans, sure, but also by coaches and front offices -- on results. Cole can get blown apart in one start and have no doubt he’ll get the ball again five days later. Schmidt enjoyed no such guarantees.

Simply put, as April careened into an ever-greater mess, Schmidt could only stay “an outing away” for so long before he stopped getting outings. And as Cole notes, “You can’t get better if you can’t pitch.”

Fortunately, the Georgia native -- whom the Yankees selected out of the University of South Carolina with the 16th overall pick in 2017 even though he was recovering from Tommy John surgery at the time -- has no problem analyzing his adversity: “I don’t see it as a failure if you learn from it,” he says. Coaches noticed it all the way back in 2020, when he was marooned at the alternate site for much of the COVID-shortened season with no Minor League games in which to pitch.

“I’m not sure that he was happy to be there,” Druschel says. “He wanted a shot at the big club. But it was also pretty clear that he had some serious things that he needed to work on. We put those things in front of him, and he worked on them every day, and he got better.”

It wasn’t immediate, and it also hasn’t stopped. Early this year, as Schmidt was having a brutal time getting lefties out, fans were undoubtedly frustrated by the borderline futility. But the right-hander kept plugging away with his new pitch package, which, starting this year, featured a cutter that he expected to help even out those platoon splits.

Schmidt has always featured a robust arsenal; it’s part of the reason that, even when he was relieving in ’22, he still profiled as a starter. He has wicked movement on his sweeper and knuckle-curve, but he needed a pitch to neutralize left-handers. His new cutter sits about 92 mph and stays above hitters’ barrels. Pitching coach Matt Blake likes the pitch for Schmidt because “he can get it up and in on lefties, and it protects the slider and the curveball a little bit more. And his two-seam and changeup should have more leeway because the pitches that are gaining on them with the cutter open up the other side of the plate. So, they can’t just sell out over there.”

Learning the pitch wasn’t hard. Schmidt always puts in the work, and the arm action is similar enough to his two-seamer. The problem, perhaps, was that the always-willing-to-learn Schmidt leaned into a different character trait, one that can be tougher to harness.

***

It’s not terribly complicated to break down what wasn’t working for Schmidt in April and, in turn, what has been since. From coaches to catchers to the pitcher himself, it was a pretty simple case of attacking hitters in their danger zones.

“I had this new pitch, and I didn’t really know how to utilize it,” Schmidt said in August. “The adjustment period the whole first month was like, How do I use this pitch? And when do I use it?”

You can’t just will your way to big league success. Schmidt put in the time to get a new cutter, but the usage patterns became predictable, and the mistakes got punished. It was almost too pugnacious, too risky. Those down-and-in cutters to lefties were trouble, a challenge for Schmidt to press through. “He would make aggressive mistakes in the areas for damage, and he’d give up a two- or three-run homer later in the game,” Blake says.

Aggression comes easy to Schmidt, in ways that can surprise and perplex. He’s an almost disconcertingly amiable person, smiling and happy whenever he moves about the clubhouse or field. He is nice in a way you want your children to be, but that you maybe don’t expect from a big league pitcher.

“He actually just said it, and I agree with him: He doesn’t hate anyone,” laughs Michael King, who came up through the Minors with Schmidt. “I’ll be honest, I hate people. There are definitely people I don’t like. I’m sure Gerrit has the same thing. I don’t think Clarke does. And that’s his niceness.” Or, in the words of Nestor Cortes, “He’s like a silent assassin. He’s nice, but when he’s out there, he’s doing his job, he’s competitive. And he’s out there to demonstrate who he is.”

Schmidt is adamant that he’s first and foremost a competitor, no one’s pushover. He has an older brother, also very athletic, and his talent was forged in a fire that demanded competition, always on the attack. “I just have this feeling where I want to rip your head off when I’m playing you,” Schmidt says. “If you play me at ping-pong, or play me in whatever, I have that competitiveness to me where I absolutely want to beat you and destroy you in everything you do.”

Uh, Clarke?

Where is this coming from? The sentiment is 180 degrees away from the genteel charmer who keeps chuckling and saying “sir.” “When I’m off the field, you don’t want to be like that or live your life like that,” he explains. “Then you’ve got a black cloud over you, almost.”

The key, from May to August, was combining those behaviors, letting them play off and offset each other. Schmidt felt himself turning a corner in his fifth start of the season, then really felt improvement in his next outing, the last time he took the mound in April. In both starts -- against Toronto and Texas, respectively -- he recorded eight strikeouts, and while his final line against Texas was ugly, with five earned runs and 10 hits, the pitcher was encouraged.

“The results were kind of sporadic, but we felt like we were getting on the right track,” Schmidt said in August. “I was striking out a lot of guys, but we just weren’t keeping runs at bay; we were giving up a lot of slug. And so I was like, ‘OK, that’s the last box I have to check off, being able to eliminate the big swing.’”

It sounds easy enough, so long as you can look past the gruesome stat line from the month. It just takes some belief. Which has never been a problem for the pitcher.

***

With Schmidt starting every fifth day this year, Boone has fielded plenty of media questions about the pitcher. Almost every time, no matter the question, and no matter Schmidt’s ERA, the Yankees’ manager has pointed out one attribute to describe his pitcher: confidence.

“I mean, have you met Clarke?” Boone said in April. “The confidence, he doesn’t lack.” Fast-forward to August: “He’s always been incredibly confident, with really good stuff, and rightfully so.” Digging deeper, Boone notes that confidence is more than how you present yourself. It also dictates how you work and how you perform. “Confidence is powerful,” he says. “When you genuinely have it, like Clarke does, I think by and large it serves you well. You want to walk out there feeling like you have all the equipment to get it done. And he’s always done that, even through times when he struggled.”

Indeed, the one unifier in Schmidt’s 2023 game log, the element that ties together the brutal performances in April with the effective and reliable outings since -- from mid-May through early August, Schmidt went 7-2 and never allowed more than three runs in any of his 14 starts -- has been a confidence that never wavered. Schmidt had plenty of reason to doubt himself when lefties were absolutely lighting up his every offering, and no one would have blamed him.

But that’s not who Schmidt was in April, and it’s not who he is now. He’s the type of student that uses the information he picks up to get better, who believes in the power of failure. It’s easy to see that the only way to learn from struggle is to believe that you can do it; otherwise, the emotional cycle is too devastating to imagine.

So Schmidt, in good times and bad, is a pitching coach’s dream, a manager’s best friend.

“The good ones are irrationally confident in some ways,” Blake says. “They continue to believe in themselves when the results in front of them aren’t good. … To be able to handle those failures in such big situations, and to be able to take positives out of them and channel it into productive work and then come back a better version of yourself, that’s what we’re striving for with all our guys.”

And that’s Schmidt in a nutshell. The vibes were bad in April and good in August, but the quotes were almost identical.

When the air still had a crisp chill, the message was, “If things are good, I’m always going to compete. And if things are bad, I’m always going to compete.” As the thick summer air took hold, it was, “I know if I have the confidence on my side and conviction in what I’m doing, then I’m going to get the best out of myself, rather than having doubts about what I’m doing, why I’m doing this, what pitch I’m picking.”

Schmidt came into 2023 to prove what he already knew: that he was a dependable starter, ready for prime time. He knew that hitters would tell him if the new cutter was working, if his pitch package was ready. They did; it wasn’t. So he kept making the adjustments that come easy to a pitcher willing to put in work, never letting his unshakable confidence wane. The results have been everything the team could hope for.

“The guy who is the best player, you could argue, is the guy who’s confident through the ups and the downs,” Schmidt says. “And so for me, it has always been the same: Don’t get too high, don’t get too low.

“There were just a lot of things that you learn throughout it, and you learn what works and what doesn’t work. And now it’s to the point where every time I go out there, the guys are looking forward to me getting the ball. And that’s a good feeling, to know that my teammates want me to be out there and the staff wants me to be out there. And every time I’m out there, we have a chance to win the ballgame. When before, in the first month, that wasn’t the case. So that’s my ultimate goal. And it should be any starter’s ultimate goal: just to give your team a chance to win every time you go out there.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor for Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the September 2023 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.