Shortly after signing the largest contract a pitcher had ever been given, Gerrit Cole was in Hawaii with his wife, Amy, for the wedding of a former college teammate. Cole’s cell phone rang one day with a number he didn’t recognize. He replied anyway.
After listening, “Hi, this is Reggie Jackson,” Cole took the phone off his ear for a second and uttered an expletive of joy. One of the biggest stars in the franchise he adored when he grew up, and to which he now belonged, called him to congratulate him.
And when Cole arrived at the team’s spring training facility in Tampa, Florida, this year, he still couldn’t believe that Jackson, a Hall of Famer and Yankees special adviser, was wandering the same grounds as he.
“I try to act well,” Cole, 29, said during an extensive interview in March.
Since December, Cole, one of the best baseball pitchers, has been, essentially, a kid in a candy store. He wasn’t nervous about his first start to spring training in February, but he was in a casual catch game with Andy Pettitte, the former Yankees pitcher who also serves as special adviser. He called it “surreal” when Willie Randolph, the team’s former player and star coach, punched him after a preseason appearance because Cole’s father, who grew up in Syracuse, New York, and broadcast his fandom from The Yankees his son, he had long admired second baseman.
“Everything is surreal,” said Cole.
When Cole steps onto the mound in Nationals Park on Thursday night to begin this shortened 60-game season against defending champion Washington Nationals, it will be a lifetime debut and one sealed by a long courtship: GM Brian Cashman has referred Cole as his “white whale” after two previous unsuccessful attempts to acquire him.
Rolled up last winter with a nine-year, $ 324 million contract that even he called “a ridiculous amount of money,” now it’s time for Cole to prove himself. Although his Yankees career will start with what is shaping up to be a bizarre season, nine years is an eternity, given the physical demands of modern pitching.
So can Cole, who went from being a talented (but often injured) pitcher with the Pittsburgh Pirates to perhaps the best in the game with the Houston Astros, maintain that excellence for the next decade?
“It’s like an action,” said relief pitcher Zack Britton. “You hope it will continue to prosper, but there is no guarantee. But it’s a good example of a guy I’d like to invest in. “
The skill was always there: Cole was on the 6-foot-3-inch, 200-pound list and shot in the 90s at Orange Lutheran High School in Orange County, California. The Yankees were tempted and selected in the first round of the 2008 Draft.
But Cole missed the opportunity to sign for millions because he and his father, who has a Ph.D., believed that it was more valuable to study at UCLA and become a better pitcher. They were right: The Pirates first selected Cole in the 2011 draft and signed him for a record $ 8 million.
The transformation into the Yankees’ $ 324 million ace has required constant modification and improvement at every stage, and Cole’s new club relies on that ambition to justify his enormous financial commitment.
“It will age well.”
Cole was good with the Pirates, a career average of 3.50 wins in five years and an All-Star pick in 2015, but two major injuries convinced him that he had to work on his durability “first,” he said, if it was going to be changed or come to free agency. He changed his training and his trainers.
Although the 2017 season was his worst, with a 4.26 ERA, Cole crossed the 200-inning plateau again and his average fastball speed rose again to 96 mph.
Houston, however, is where he thrived, after the Astros beat the Yankees to trade for Cole prior to the 2018 season. With the help of the Astros’ central analysis office, he realized that his Four seams was more effective than the two-seater he had been using, particularly high in the strike zone, where he could counter home runs from higher hits. they were using more and more.
“Basically I learned a new pitch by prioritizing my four seams,” said Cole, who scrapped the two-seam fastball.
Always a sponge of baseball strategy, Cole chose the brain of his teammate Justin Verlander to take advantage of his fastball and that of Dallas Keuchel to better understand how to fool rival hitters with perceived balls and shots. Opponents hit .166 against Cole’s four-seam fastball, the lowest average in the majors among starting pitchers in 2019.
“It’s kind of awesome,” wide receiver Gary Sanchez said. “If you see him high in the area, continue. It’s not that I get high and then fall. “
Cole’s two seasons in Houston were the best of his career. In 2019, he was 20-5 with a 2.50 ERA and 326 strikeouts in 212 innings, and earned a win over the Yankees in the American League Championship Series on the way to World Series defeat to the Nationals. . He finished second behind Verlander for the AL Cy Young Award.
Cole said it can improve further, without specifying exactly how.
“You see this with most of the great players: They are never really satisfied and they always scratch, ‘Where can I improve a little or where can I make small improvements?'” Manager Aaron Boone said. “With him, you really notice that.”
It is in part because of that drive and intellect that Matt Blake, the Yankees’ new pitching coach, said he believed Cole would break the aging curve of most players in baseball.
“It is not a one-trick pony where once the speed of the fastball increases, it is no longer viable,” Blake said. “He is going to age well because he knows how to shape the ball, and he understands very well what the greats have done and how they have evolved.”
The signs of Cole’s rigorous attention to detail have been obvious since he signed with the Yankees. The day after a spring training game in March, he talked to Sanchez about pitching strategies, mimicking hitters’ punches and plotting attacks in a hand-drawn strike zone. When a teammate has been throwing a live batting practice, Cole often watches closely. And while he has no reason to hit this season, he’s been in the ear of hitting coach Marcus Thames.
“Gerrit likes to talk about hitting,” said Thames. “He is so cerebral, that he will come to ask me.”
“They pay me for my work.”
Cole knows that people will question the wisdom of his nine-figure contract. In response, he recited a list of success stories from the best starting pitchers on big contracts, including Max Scherzer (two Cy Young Awards and the 2019 World Series title), Jon Lester (2016 World Series title), and Verlander ( a Cy Young Award) and the title of the 2017 World Series).
Cole brushed aside the notion that the Yankees hope his return will be worth his early years, while dismissing subsequent years as an inevitable slump, as is sometimes the case with contracts as long as his own.
“They really don’t pay me for my opinion,” Cole said. “They pay me for my work. And I can promise you that I will always work. Everyone else is entitled to their opinions, but I am here to be the best I can be, help contribute to this clubhouse environment as best I can, and prepare myself as best I can. I’m ready to do this. “
Finally, Cole knows that he will be judged, even by himself, in championships. In a traditional 162-game regular season, Cole would make up to 34 starts. This year, it may be just 12. The margin of error is less in a season laden with pressure and expectations for the Yankees, who have not won a World Series since 2009. Their contract is not a small investment for a team that has restrained its spending in recent years.
“We need to win,” he said. “My performance is my performance. But as a team and organization, the goal is to win a World Series. All I need to do to help achieve that is really what I’m going to do. “
With his nine-year contract (which could be extended to 10 years if the Yankees trigger a clause), Cole won’t be going anywhere for long. This is home. And if he had signed this massive deal with a team other than the Yankees, Cole said he would have begged to wear pinstripes when his contract ran out at 38.
“He would have been knocking on the door: ‘Please give me a job,'” he said.
Back at his home in Southern California, Cole has three memorable possessions. One is a ball that Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame shortstop, threw at the 11-year-old Cole in Arizona during the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks. Another is the now-famous “Yankee Fan Today Tomorrow Forever” sign Cole was seen holding in the stands of that series, the same one he led to his introductory press conference in New York in December.
The third piece of memories feels like a fitting bookend when Cole embarks on his own Yankees journey. During that World Series, Cole secured a famous Yankee’s autograph on a ball at a coffee shop across the street from the team’s hotel: Jackson’s.
