TAMPA — While preparing to endeavor to better perfection, Gerrit Cole mentors the Yankees’ kid pitchers, advises managing partner Hal Steinbrenner, engages reporter after reporter here — somehow finding time for all of it. He’s a man now who’s noticeably comfortable (but not nearly satisfied), a man who’s reached the pinnacle of his career, realizing the promise of a prodigy, that rare No. 1 draft choice who’s risen to become the majors’ No. 1 pitcher.
Cole’s true value may be up to around $50 million a year, but it’s hard to pinpoint the worth of an arm without comps. In a case without dissent, he is the best and most dependable pitcher in the game. He stands as a given at the top of the Yankees’ rotation — manager Aaron Boone doesn’t really have to name his Opening Day starter, it’s Cole by acclimation.
Yankees people occasionally note while weighing whether to sign Blake Snell, a free-agent star and the sport’s other reigning Cy Young winner, that the $162M deal for Carlos Rodon looks regrettable after Rodon’s wasted inaugural season. However, the other side of that pricey coin lockers adjacent to Rodon here, and Cole’s record free-agent deal for $324M over nine season, done with agent Scott Boras, looks like a steal now. (Sources say Cole endorsed Snell as part of his side job as Steinbrenner co-confidant along with superstar Aaron Judge, although he diplomatically declined comment.)
In an era of arm attrition where most contemporaries’ overriding goal is to merely stay healthy, and available, Cole is aiming to improve off one of the best pitching years in Yankees history, a unanimous Cy Young win that’s underappreciated considering all the chaos and pain around him. While the Yankees’ rotation and lineup were decimated by injury, Cole led MLB with a 7.4 pitching WAR and 0.98 WHIP and led the AL with 209 innings and a 2.63 ERA. He was like the man in the old Colt 45 commercial, continuing to do his thing while everything around him explodes.
Unsurprisingly, Cole expects better. He told me he’s endeavoring to take his cutter to “the next step” and sees room to “refine” his command. He’s a pitching genius in search of perfection.
Cole’s Cy Young probably should have been his second. He was denied the first in his platform year in Houston when he was at least the equal of rotation-mate Justin Verlander. (Verlander has been robbed twice himself; unlike Cole, writers are fallible.) The award was his holy grail, bringing a jubilation/relief mix.
“It was a real special honor that filled me with a lot of pride. I’m just really happy to do it in this uniform and represent this organization,” Cole said. “There’s been a lot of great players here. And so I feel like I kind of actually did something, like a little bit relative to Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Babe Ruth. It’s like, well, maybe I’m not those players. But you feel like you’re contributing to the greater brand.”
Cole is 33, but there’s a long way to go, surely in pinstripes. For a moment or two, Cole said he thought he’d wind up with his hometown Angels. After a meeting with the Angels owners Arte and Carole Moreno at a Southern California hotel, he said he felt sure he’d wind up there. But then the Angels offered a deal valued at about $235M, which is what they gave Anthony Rendon, who famously said he doesn’t like baseball. The Yankees, after signaling they’d repeat the $245M, seven-year deal just given to Stephen Strasburg earlier in December 2019, added the game-clinching two extra years after recognizing Cole was not only two years younger, but also better and healthier.
Cole has an opt-out after this year, and assuming he exercises it, the Yankees can bring him back by adding a 10th year at $36M, which seems like a fait accompli. (If so, his contract will once again become the highest in history for a pitcher by bringing him to $360M and passing Japanese phenom’s Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s new $325M deal.)
There’s really no end in sight for a pitcher who’s so good now he has no competitors as the game’s best. Asked how long he’s going to keep going, without hesitation he says as long as he can. It’s almost as if he feels an obligation to maximize his gift. Or as he put it, he’s “trying to squeeze all the juice out of the lemon I was given.”
Of course, there is one more big objective left, which is why he so enthusiastically endorsed Snell — who’d give the Yankees maybe their best one-two pitching punch ever — though Cole remains hopeful about the kids he’s advising here. (“I haven’t seen anybody with bad stuff here,” he said of the youngsters.)
The World Series is the “ultimate goal,” he said.
“That would be the sweetest of them all,” said Cole of a World Series win. “It’s super hard. But that’s what keeps you coming back.”
There’s that, and of course the continuing drive for perfection.
