NEW YORK — For one of the unquestioned greatest pitchers of his generation, Gerrit Cole is still without many of the accolades that are often associated with such greatness.
He’s never won a Cy Young award. He’s never won a World Series. He’s never even started an All-Star Game. Many of his accomplishments have been overshadowed, mostly for reasons beyond his control.
As he was climbing toward the baseball mountaintop in Pittsburgh, charismatic superstar teammate Andrew McCutchen became the natural face of the Pirates’ brief revitalization. His best year in Houston, 2019, saw Cole lead the American League in ERA and all of Major League Baseball in strikeouts. Still, Justin Verlander beat him for the Cy Young and the Nationals beat him for a championship. His superb 2020 season, like many things, will mostly be lost to the pandemic, fading out of our collective memory with the passage of time. Then came 2021, yet another Cy Young-caliber season for Cole, who had to settle for second place, and whose season ended with the Red Sox knocking him out of the wild-card game just six outs in.
Cole has made an estimated $75 million in salary, plus the $9 million the Pirates gave him as a signing bonus in 2011. By the time his current contract with the Yankees — the richest ever given to a pitcher — runs out in 2028, he’ll have stacked over $335 million in MLB money.
This leaves Cole in a perplexing, presumably somewhat unfulfilled state. There aren’t many things left for him to check off the list, but there’s also some huge ones. This season is undoubtedly a turning point for the Yankees, who could lose Aaron Judge to free agency at the end of it and have to start paying Giancarlo Stanton even more in 2023, as the slugger’s annual salary jumps from $29 million to $32 million. Many of the moves they’ve made (re-signing Anthony Rizzo, trading for Josh Donaldson and Isiah Kiner-Falefa) feel like temporary fixes as they wait for prospects to arrive, which will officially begin a new era in the Bronx.
But prospects are hardly a sure thing, while Cole has been one of the game’s surest aces for nearly a decade. Now on the wrong side of 30 with the typical wear and tear on his body, one has to wonder what Cole’s game will look like as he ages. The fact he hasn’t started losing velocity yet is a great sign for the power pitcher. But he’s also added a cutter to his repertoire, something that indicates, at least slightly, an ideological shift that is typical of pitchers entering the back half of their career. One day his fastball won’t sit at 97 miles per hour anymore and he won’t strike out a third of the hitters he faces. Whether the cutter was birthed out of a desire to start preparing early for that day, or just to become even meaner on the mound, Cole is clearly not content with trying the same things over again and hoping for different results.
If this is the year the Yankees return to the promised land, it will likely be in large part because of Cole. A fierce competitor with something still to prove — the Fenway farce brought Cole’s ERA to 5.77 over his last six postseason starts — it’s not hard to imagine Cole asking for the ball on short rest if it means delivering the thing that he and the Yankees are both sorely missing.
The big right-hander is one of the best in the world at his job and should be again in 2022, which is exactly why the urgency to win now should be felt from the Yankees’ executive suites to their dugout. The fact that his season will begin with the same Red Sox team that embarrassed him so thoroughly last October presents Cole with an instant opportunity for redemption. While one game out of 162 is basically nothing, a strong season opener against a despised rival would be big for tone setting purposes, even if all of that can easily be wiped away by May.
What we see from Cole this year will dictate much of what we see from the Yankees as a whole. If he pitches well, consistently going deep into games and handing leads to the bullpen, he takes some of the slack off both the relief corps and the back end of the rotation, each of which come with their own deficiencies. Opposing starters have a way of bringing their A-game when they know they’re facing Cole, too, so any big time performance from him allows the offense to squeak by in 3-2 or 2-1 victories against Cole’s fired up counterpart.
If we project Cole for 30 starts, that’s roughly 18% of the Yankees’ full schedule. For most of those starts, the Yankees will have a better chance to win than the team across from them. But as he learned last year — whether it was giving up seven runs at home to Cleveland in his third-to-last regular season outing, five runs in Toronto during his final start, or the night from hell in Boston — those chances at winning decrease dramatically when Gerrit Cole doesn’t pitch like Gerrit Cole.
We’ll find out soon which version of Cole shows up for the start of the season, and down the road, much more importantly, which version is around at the end.
