Waiting his turn: What Clarke Schmidt does behind the scenes each day between starts

NEW YORK — New York Yankees starter Clarke Schmidt admits that he’s about as close to a perfectionist as a person can be. That’s not always a good thing in his line of work.

In an ideal regular season, a starting pitcher will play in anywhere from 30 to 33 games per year, likely a little less than a fifth of a team’s 162-game schedule. And not all of them are going to be Cy Young-worthy.

It took the 29-year-old, who’ll make his 10th start of the 2025 season Wednesday night in Kansas City, years to come to grips with this fact.

“Baseball is a game where stuff can go your way and stuff doesn’t go your way,” Schmidt said. “Maybe the ball will bounce your way, or maybe it doesn’t. People have to understand that there’s so much luck involved in this game.

“You can have a double bounce over a guy’s head, then the next guy hits a bloop single, and then it’s a three-run homer. You can still feel like you did everything right and then give up three runs. You learn that you have to take yourself out of it and be very self-aware that you can’t hang your hat on every single outing. Going out there every five days is what matters. I’m going out there giving my team a chance to win.”

Schmidt hugs catcher Austin Wells before a start at Yankee Stadium earlier this year. (New York Yankees / Getty Images)

When he’s alone in his apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, Schmidt will constantly run through his next opponent’s lineup and play out the game in his head — how he’ll attack a certain hitter, when and where he’ll throw a certain pitch, and how he’ll get out of any scenario he finds himself in.

“I don’t think of it as manifestation, but I want to get to a place where you’re just able to see things in your mind where you can conceptualize what positive things can happen before you go out there,” Schmidt said.

Even though a starting pitcher may only play once a week, there’s so much work behind the scenes that he must do to get ready for his next outing. Schmidt took The Athletic inside what he does every day leading up to his starts and what he does when it’s his day to pitch.

Day 1 after a start

There are times when Schmidt will wake up after a start and ask himself, “Did I get hit by a car?”

If he doesn’t get good sleep after a start, it’s a guarantee that the next day will be torturous. But if he’s able to rest, he’ll begin his day by going for a walk around his neighborhood and thinking about what transpired the day before.

“Typically, there’s a dopamine rush after you’ve finished your day (to pitch). Day 1, I wake up early and I’m ready to get a good coffee and breakfast,” Schmidt said. “I like to start a clean slate and get ready for my next turn.”

When Schmidt arrives at the stadium and begins his work, he’ll start by doing some low-intensity cardio where the objective is to increase his heart rate and get a sweat in. An example of this, he says, would be a fast 40-minute walk on the treadmill or a quicker workout on the StairMaster. From there, Schmidt will do a deep stretching session where he does yoga poses aimed at finding different spots of his body that may feel tight.

After yoga, Schmidt will let his body determine whether he’ll hit the weight room. If he’s perfectly healthy, he’ll do a light-mobility type of lift where he’ll do five different exercises in the gym designed to get him to sweat more than his light cardio.

What he won’t do is max rep any weight. That’s something he learned only recently. When he first got to the big leagues, Schmidt would lift heavy and emphasize squatting as much as he possibly could. He wanted to prove that he was powerful and belonged with the guys who looked bigger than he was.

“I found that it just added to my soreness for a few more days than necessary,” Schmidt said. “So if I’m in the gym, it’s more body weight-type of lifting. I go for very low-level stuff. As for the lifting, I’m not trying to gain strength during the season. It’s more about maintaining.”

Following a lift, Schmidt will then either get a massage, dry needling or both. He says he “definitely” has to incorporate one of those in his routine after a start. He’s found that digging into the tissue and finding sore areas helps him more on the front end of his five-day routine.

Dry needling is not the same as acupuncture in that it focuses on healing inflammation on a deeper level in a person’s muscles and tendons. Acupuncture focuses on restoring the balance and harmony in the body and is less focused on healing deep soreness. From there, if the Yankees are at home, he’ll go into the sauna to further reduce any stress and pain. If the Yankees are on the road and that particular stadium doesn’t have a sauna available to visiting players, he’ll rotate from hot and cold tubs.

A key for the first day after a start is eating as much as possible because a starter can burn thousands of calories, depending on their workload. Another piece to Day 1 is watching the outing from the night before. It’s typically the first thing Schmidt will do in the morning after getting back from his walk. If he doesn’t have enough time to watch it before leaving for the stadium, he’ll watch it before doing anything else.

“I’m not writing stuff down, but I am watching it from a bird’s-eye view where I’ll take myself out of it and try to watch it like if I’m watching someone else pitch, what did they do right pitch selection-wise?” Schmidt said. “Mechanically, I am looking for different cues to see if everything looks right with my extension and my arm slot. I am also looking for things I was trying to work on that week, or where I felt like I was right on the pitch selection or where I felt like I was wrong. You’re trying to observe small, nuanced things that I don’t pick up on during the game.”

Day 2

This is the first day a starting pitcher will throw in preparation for his next outing. He will make sure he’s properly stretched before throwing off flat ground for 30 to 35 pitches. It’s important to note that none of the Yankees starters are throwing at maximum velocity in this session. They are throwing lightly with the objective of getting a little sweaty.

After throwing, the plan may vary on Day 2, depending on how his body is feeling after an intense recovery day. On some weeks, Schmidt would do a mobility-focused lift on Day 2, but more often than not, he won’t lift any weights. Instead, he’ll visit the training room, where he’ll work on isometrics, holding various poses for 30 to 45 seconds — usually with a tension band — that stress the ligaments or tendons. He’ll then follow that up with either the sauna or hot/cold tubs.

“That’s pretty much it for Day 2,” Schmidt said. “It’s a light day. Day 2 or Day 4, the day before you pitch, is the lightest of your week.”

Day 2 is also the first day he’ll begin to intensely scout his next opponent if he hasn’t faced them already this season. For Schmidt, that meant scouting the Royals this past Sunday. He’ll go through every hitter he might face and look at their tendencies, which pitches they might struggle with and their hot and cold zones. He must get a heavy scout in on Day 2 because it directly leads into the following day.

Day 3

His scouting work from the previous day goes into effect in the bullpen, where he’ll throw 25 to 28 pitches. A common misconception is that a starter is always throwing his hardest when he’s on the mound; it’s not true. But this took Schmidt until his third year to implement.

In his first few seasons, Schmidt would throw in the mid-90s on his bullpen day until Gerrit Cole asked him what he was doing. Schmidt was the only Yankee who was throwing at 100 percent strength. He’s now dialed it back to about 50 to 60 percent strength, depending on the week.

“I found out I would always have things pop up in my arm,” Schmidt said. “I’d be like, why am I throwing max effort again? It would be extra soreness that I did not need, and then that could lead to injury if it compiles. Gerrit would be like, ‘Dude, you’re throwing way too hard.’ It took a while for me to make that adjustment where it’s like, ‘S—, I do not need to be doing this.’

“Some veterans may do it, but I don’t know any who do it. So, it’s like if they’re not doing it, why would I do it? When you’re younger and you feel froggy, you find that every three days you’re ready to rip it, and I want to see some nasty s— on the mound. It’s easy to get caught up in looking at the Trackman and see you’re spinning it and your breaks are crazy, and then you’re chasing the numbers. You can get caught in that circle of doing too much.”

The bullpen is also important because he’ll put his scouting work from the day before into motion. For example, if he knows a club is going to load up with left-handed hitters, he knows he’s going to throw a high usage of cutters in his next start. That means his bullpen will mirror what he’s likely going to throw when he takes the mound next.

The scouting work a pitcher does is arguably the most important part of the job. Pitchers are always thinking about what they would do if they were on the mound. That’s why starting pitchers normally watch games together in the dugout. They are typically quizzing one another on what they would do if they were out there.

“You are always adjusting,” Schmidt said. “There’s also recency bias of what are they doing well? Any time you’re facing the elite hitters, sometimes you can fall into the trap of over-scouting. Sometimes, they can just hit crazy pitches all of the time and there’s nothing you can really do about it. The key is how you can be unpredictable and change speeds. For me, I do a lot of scout work before my starts. Any time I can try to gain an edge, I’ll do it.”

Day 4

Schmidt stretches before a game against the Rays in Tampa on April 20. He would start the next day in Cleveland. (New York Yankees / Getty Images)

The day before a start closely mirrors what happens on Day 2. If a starter wants to get an extra throwing session in, he will do so off flat ground. This is typically done if he wants to work on a particular pitch that he feels needs extra refinement.

Sometimes, Schmidt will get a light massage and hit the sauna. Whatever Schmidt decides to do, the biggest thing is to relax as much as he possibly can.

Start day

On Wednesday, Schmidt will wake up in Kansas City and have a coffee while he continues to do his last-second checks after all of the scouting work he’s already put in. He’ll have closely watched Tuesday’s game to get a better sense of the state of the Royals’ lineup.

He’ll get to Kauffman Stadium around 3 p.m. He doesn’t want to arrive too early because he finds that when that happens, he’ll start getting too anxious. Schmidt will eat a big meal three to four hours before the game and then won’t eat again until his start is complete. He doesn’t want to feel full when he’s on the mound.

After his meal, he’ll meet with the starting catcher, pitching coach Matt Blake and assistant pitching coach Preston Claiborne to go over the plan that night. By then, Schmidt’s scouting work is complete. He’s relaying what he sees in their lineup and what he feels is the best way to go about it. Blake and Claiborne will then give their assessment of how they view Kansas City’s lineup, and either Austin Wells or J.C. Escarra will provide their input. The meeting is meant to finalize their best plan of attack, which they’ll all agree upon together.

When he was earlier in his career, Schmidt would be too amped on his start day. He’s now much calmer. By the time he takes the mound, he has already visualized every at-bat of the game. By then, it’s on him to execute those visions.

“I used to be extra, extra hyped and now I’m very comfortable where I wake up and it feels like another day,” Schmidt said. “It’s not the same, but I kind of treat it like another day, but I’m also ready to rock. It’s kind of like, I’m ready for a fight and ready to go into battle.”

(Top photo: New York Yankees / Getty Images)