Five MLB Starters Off to Hot Starts in 2026
Parker Messick has allowed one earned run through 11 innings in 2026. That’s not a fluke. That’s a problem for every lineup he’s set to face.
Two weeks into the season, a few starters are making everyone rethink what the pitching hierarchy actually looks like this year. Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes, both Cy Young award winners coming off dominant seasons, have each surrendered four-plus earned runs in single outings already. Meanwhile, the guys doing damage right now aren’t the ones you’d find on anyone’s preseason shortlist.
Messick, the Cleveland Guardians left-hander, didn’t show up out of nowhere. He closed out 2025 with seven starts, a 2.72 ERA, and 39.2 innings that included a 3.6% walk rate that wasn’t a product of weak competition. He carried all of it into April. Through two starts in 2026, he’s got a 0.82 ERA, a 0.91 WHIP, 11 strikeouts, and three walks. His fastball sits at 93.1 MPH, so he’s not blowing hitters off the plate. What he’s doing instead is deploying one of the nastiest changeups in the American League. The pitch is generating a 57.9% whiff rate, and he’s attacking right-handed hitters with it repeatedly. He still qualifies for Rookie of the Year voting. If he’s pitching like this come June, that race won’t ignore him.
A Guardians development staffer who spoke with a pool reporter covering the club told them, “He’s got the best changeup in the organization, and he knows exactly when to throw it.”
That quote holds up when you watch the StatCast data. MLB’s StatCast database documents the kind of release-point consistency and movement profiles that scouts can describe but can’t fully quantify, and Messick’s numbers there back every word of it.
Then there’s Cam Schlittler. The New York Yankees don’t seem surprised by any of this. Schlittler was a national conversation for about 48 hours after he shut out the Red Sox over eight innings of five-hit ball in last year’s Wild Card Series, walking nobody and striking out 12. Some people wrote it off as a playoff adrenaline outlier. It wasn’t. Through three starts in 2026, Schlittler is 2-0 with a 1.62 ERA and 22 strikeouts over 16.2 innings, per this early-season breakdown from Just Baseball. That strikeout rate won’t hold at that level all season. Nobody’s does. But Schlittler’s got the repertoire to sustain something in that neighborhood far longer than his doubters are comfortable admitting.
Good pitching is good pitching.
What both of these arms are doing isn’t schedule-padding against weak April lineups. It’s the result of real developmental work, secondary pitch refinement, and command that shows up in the underlying metrics whether or not the ERA looks pretty on a given night. For anyone tracking the Baseball America prospect pipeline, Messick and Schlittler represent exactly the kind of development arc that takes years to build and about 10 days to make everyone pay attention to.
April 10 was the last time Messick’s ERA was above 1.00. It hasn’t been since.