The Yankees opened October by beating Boston 9-0 Tuesday night, with Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice at the center of it. Both debuted here within the last two years.
Aaron Judge watched from outside the Wild Card roster as he works back from a strained right calf. Ten years ago, he was the rookie. On Tuesday, Rice and Schlittler carried a playoff game without him, and tonight the Yankees can send Boston home.
The rules: You had to debut here as a rookie. No free agents. No trade pickups who’d already made their name somewhere else. Where you ended up doesn’t matter. We’re going chronologically by debut — mostly.
1. Aaron Judge, Yankees (2016)
He homered in his first big-league at-bat, back-to-back with fellow debutant Tyler Austin. He hit 52 homers and won Rookie of the Year in 2017. In 2022, he hit 62 to pass Roger Maris, and he has since collected three MVPs and the captaincy.
Before most of that, with free agency approaching in 2021, Judge said what Yankees fans wanted to hear: “I want to be a Yankee for life.”
He got his wish. Ten years after his debut, every other name here gets measured, at least a little, against the ceiling he set for what “homegrown” can mean in New York.
2. Saquon Barkley, Giants (2018)
Barkley was born in the Bronx and grew up in Pennsylvania. By the time the Giants took him No. 2 overall, he’d become a star at Penn State and was supposed to be the face of their next generation.
He won Offensive Rookie of the Year with 2,028 yards from scrimmage and spent six seasons giving bad Giants teams most of their electricity, even as injuries kept interrupting the ride. He talked about wanting to be a “Giant for life.”
Instead, the Giants never formally offered him a new contract that final offseason. On Hard Knocks, owner John Mara admitted he’d have “a tough time sleeping” if Barkley wound up in Philadelphia.
He did. Barkley went down the Turnpike, rushed for 2,005 yards, won Offensive Player of the Year and added a Super Bowl.
Giants fans have had some tough nights sleeping too.
3. Pete Alonso, Mets (2019)
Alonso hit 53 homers as a rookie and won Rookie of the Year. By the end of seven seasons in Queens, he was the Mets’ all-time home run leader.
He was a little goofy and openly emotional, and almost always in the lineup — right through the ninth-inning homer in Milwaukee that saved their 2024 season.
In his first series back at Citi Field since signing with Baltimore, Alonso got a standing ovation from the crowd that had watched him grow up. Then he hit career homer No. 300 in the same ballpark where it all started.
4. Adam Fox, Rangers (2019)
Fox is the technicality that proves the rule. Calgary drafted him and later sent his rights to Carolina; neither team ever got an NHL game out of him.
The kid from Jericho grew up going to Rangers games with his family. His first Rangers jersey was a Brian Leetch No. 2, and by his second NHL season, Fox had a Norris Trophy.
Homegrown by debut, if not by paperwork.
5. Jack Hughes, Devils (2019)
Hughes may have been born in Florida, but his family already had roots here. His father was born on Long Island, and his grandfather spent nearly 30 years with the FDNY, eventually rising to battalion chief.
The Devils drafted Hughes No. 1 overall in 2019. He managed 21 points as a rookie; three years later, his 99 set the franchise’s single-season record. This past February, he scored the overtime winner against Canada to give the U.S. its first Olympic men’s hockey gold since 1980.
These days, No. 86 jerseys are everywhere in and outside the Prudential Center, on the PATH train and inside the Garden whenever there’s a Battle of the Hudson.
6. Igor Shesterkin, Rangers (2020)
Henrik Lundqvist was still a Ranger when Shesterkin made his NHL debut. Before his breakout 2021-22 season, a kid at a preseason game held up a sign predicting he’d someday win the Vezina Trophy. Shesterkin remembers looking at it and thinking: “Why not?”
He won it that season. The Rangers have since made two Eastern Conference Finals with him in net, and eventually committed $92 million over eight years to keep him there. By then, replacing Lundqvist had stopped feeling like the impossible New York job it once seemed to be.
Seven Rangers made their team debuts Tuesday night against Boston, but Shesterkin’s part looked familiar. He kept it scoreless until Boston broke through with 3:46 left in a 3-0 win.
7. Sabrina Ionescu, Liberty (2020)
The No. 1 pick made it three games into her rookie season before an ankle injury ended it in the bubble. Four years later, during a playoff game at a packed Barclays Center, Spike Lee gave her a high-five as she went to inbound the ball.
“I felt like New York was injected into me,” Ionescu said.
Weeks later came the 28-footer with a second left in Game 3 of the Finals and, finally, the Liberty’s first championship.
Two years later, the eighth-seeded Liberty drew No. 1 Minnesota in the first round and swept the Lynx. Ionescu had 18 points and seven assists in Tuesday’s 87-71 clincher at Barclays, as New York became the first No. 8 seed to eliminate a No. 1 under the WNBA’s current playoff format.
8. Ben Rice, Yankees (2024)
Rice grew up in Massachusetts as a Yankees fan and wore a Yankees jersey to first-grade picture day, which is one way to make yourself memorable in Red Sox country.
Two decades later, he became the first Yankees rookie to hit three homers in a game — against Boston, naturally. He got sent back down a month later. By his first postseason, he was back and homered in his first playoff at-bat.
Rice followed that with a 41-homer All-Star season. With Judge unavailable Tuesday, he went 4-for-5 and drove in six in the Yankees’ 9-0 win. He homered twice, with the second an eighth-inning grand slam.
9. Cam Schlittler, Yankees (2025)
Schlittler started 2025 in Double-A. Three months after his big-league debut, the kid from outside Boston threw eight shutout innings with 12 strikeouts in a winner-take-all playoff game against the Red Sox.
Back on the same mound a year later, Schlittler gave Boston 6⅓ more scoreless innings, struck out 10 and allowed just two hits and a walk. His 117 pitches were the most by a Yankee in a postseason game since 2012.
On The Slate’s live postgame Tuesday night, Underscore’s own John Jastremski compared it to The Godfather Part II.
“It was just as good,” he said.
Schlittler finished the regular season with a 1.95 ERA and entered October as the Cy Young frontrunner. His résumé is much shorter than anyone else’s here, but it already includes two scoreless playoff starts against Boston.
10. Mitchell Robinson, Knicks (2018)
The Knicks won a title, so Mitch goes last.
At his introductory news conference in 2018, Robinson wore jeans and a blazer a size too big. His answers were short. The GM kept finishing them for him.
He was a second-round pick, born in Pensacola, Florida, who finished high school in Chalmette, Louisiana. He’d never played a college game. The Knicks team he joined would win 17 games.
He was never going to be a city kid, either. Robinson settled in White Plains because Manhattan was “too bunched up. As he put it: “Down in Louisiana, it’s so flat. In New York, you got all these hills.”
“Mitch is always Mitch,” RJ Barrett once said, and through the rebuilds and the surgeries, he was. The Knicks were the ones who changed.
In June, Robinson came off the bench to grab 10 rebounds in the clincher that ended 53 years of waiting. The night before the parade, he let the neighborhood kids climb on his monster truck and signed a middle school yearbook.
Then he signed with Boston, of all places — the team that spent the 2025 playoffs trying to foul him off the floor. On his way out, he wrote that he’d “always have love for where it all started.”
He’ll be wearing Boston green this season, while we’re still wearing our championship hoodies.
Most of the guys standing beside him at the end took a very different route to New York. Not one member of the Knicks’ championship starting five began his career as a Knick. Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart, OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns all arrived after making their names somewhere else.
By the time the parade came around, nobody was asking where any of them started.