Yankees Mag: Never Easy

Gerrit Cole stood at his locker looking off into the distance. Instead of any kind of answer, all that cracked through his lip was a not altogether friendly, almost sneer-like smirk. Despite the pitcher’s stern demeanor on the mound, the real Gerrit Cole usually has a perfectly affable disposition. This wasn’t one of those times.

There was no malice inherent in the question, just an observation. For Cole, who dominated the American League in 2023 and was rewarded with the circuit’s Cy Young Award, the follow-up has been a different story. When a balky pitching elbow forced him onto the injured list during Spring Training, Yankees fans -- so excited to see what could happen when Juan Soto joined Aaron Judge in an ever-more-fierce lineup -- were understandably devastated. Cole, himself, was just as crestfallen to miss time; how long it would be was impossible to know. But an elbow is no small thing for a pitcher, and when you’re counted on to be an ace, simply returning to the mound isn’t the ultimate goal.

Cole powered through a structured rehab and got back on the big league mound in mid-June. And he was very good. Sometimes exceptional. But as he essentially tried to recreate Spring Training in the first weeks of summer, something strange happened: Gerrit Cole showed his work.

It just looks so easy when the stud right-hander is dealing. He’s so aggressive, so menacing on the mound, that he gives off an aura of total control. He seems like he can select the right pitch every time and put it exactly where he wants to. It just seems fated, gifted … easy.

So, about that question:

Does it feel good at all, maybe even a bit freeing, to let people see that this is all really hard, that nothing is guaranteed, even for a defending Cy Young winner? Is there a certain charm in showing a very human side that comes across as less easy?

Cole didn’t speak for a bit, almost assuming his intimidating mound demeanor. He gave that smirk. And eventually, he offered a simple, telling, response:

“Last year wasn’t easy.”

It’s the curse of the über-successful, the way we allow the finished symphony to hide each individually selected note. So, with apologies to the Yankees’ ace, we can stipulate that baseball is hard both when it looks hard and also when it looks easy. Yet, there was still something special on display this year, as we watched an all-time great find his way and emerge fresh and finished just in time for the season’s biggest games.

***

Cole’s greatness takes many forms, but one of the easiest to recognize can be seen among the first columns on his Baseball-Reference page. Not counting the shortened 2020 season, the pitcher made at least 30 starts in every season from 2017 to 2023, his ages 26 through 32 seasons. If the cliche says that the greatest ability is availability, then Cole had that part down. “He’s been so durable in his career,” says Yankees manager Aaron Boone. “It’s been one of his calling cards.”

So much so that Cole didn’t really know how to handle his first extended injured-list stint since 2016. “They told me when I got hurt, ‘It’s OK to unplug this first week. It’s OK to be emotional about what just happened. It’s OK to just relax a little bit,’” the right-hander recalls. “There’s nothing really to accomplish other than to get you out of that fight-or-flight mode and into that parasympathetic state.”

Both Boone and Cole noted that the time away from the usual every-fifth-day grind would be a unique experience for the pitcher, offering some added family time. Cole, specifically, said that he used the opportunity to become a better parent and a better teammate. In particular, he noted the rare chances to take his older son to school in the morning, as well as being around to hear his 1-year-old start to form words. As far as his role as a teammate, though? Cole has always been one of the best.

He’s so much more than a pitcher who puts up impressive stat lines nearly every time he starts. If, as his manager says, a big league roster is a “living, breathing organism,” then Cole is the biology professor who has studied every cell.

“If you spend a week with Gerrit, you almost start second-guessing your career,” Nestor Cortes says. “Because you’re like, ‘How the [heck] does this guy know so much?’”

Every pitcher has some version of it. They’ll sit next to Cole during a game that the ace isn’t starting, and they’ll see him work through the strategy that the batterymates should be employing. He’ll accurately predict pitches, and he’ll point out things that no one else sees. He’ll teach in a way that shows dedication and concern for his teammates, helping them work through troubles and unlock keys to success.

Reliever Clay Holmes explains that Cole is great at diagnosing errors. “He understands deliveries and misses -- where you’re missing, and what that means,” Holmes says. “Sometimes you miss, you get frustrated, you try to go back and do the same things, and those things compound pretty fast if you don’t make an adjustment. For me, where I miss, what does that mean? Is that an adjustment I can make? Or should I just go to a different pitch? That whole thought process.”

But it’s not just pitchers. When Cole showed up at Yankees camp for the first time in 2020, before the world shut down and everyone headed home for a few months, he quickly showed his cards to one of the team’s elite sluggers. Cole and Aaron Judge hadn’t met yet, but the Yankees had been dispatched by Cole’s former club, the Astros, in the previous year’s American League Championship Series.

Judge -- not yet the team’s official captain but clearly established as a clubhouse leader -- introduced himself, then learned what type of teammate he would be playing behind.

“We were walking in between the tunnel,” Judge says. “I saw him, said hello and we sat there for 20 minutes at 8 o’clock in the morning. He was breaking down, ‘Here’s the scouting report, this is how we attacked you, this is what teams look at.’

“He’s a guy that knows a lot about the game, knows a lot about pitching, knows a lot about hitters from facing guys and how to read swings. He wants to share his knowledge, and that’s one thing that makes him an ace. It’s not just the stuff he’s done on the field, but the stuff behind the scenes, where he’s writing up scouting reports, or what he’s seeing with [Carlos] Rodón, or talking to [Marcus] Stroman about different things he’s seeing, talking to Nestor and [Luis] Gil. It’s impressive to watch.”

That work, Judge says, continued during this season’s first two-plus months, when Cole couldn’t contribute on the field. He was present as ever, there to offer advice to pitchers when they struggled or to give a high-five to celebrate a guy’s success.

“I think people got a chance to see more of what he brings to this team,” the captain says. “It’s not just seven innings and 10 K’s -- which is pretty good. He brings a lot more.”

***

Seven innings and 10 strikeouts … those are numbers Cole is used to posting. Last year, on the road to his first Cy Young, he pitched at least seven frames 11 times and crossed the 10-K threshold in five starts. In his career, he has 31 games in which he has reached both marks.

But through his Sept. 14 outing against Boston this year, Cole hadn’t yet pitched into the seventh inning in any of his first 15 starts, and he had just a single 10-K performance (on Aug. 10, when he went 5 1/3 frames).

None of which is particularly surprising. Most pitchers come out of Spring Training ready to pitch in real games, but it takes time to reach midseason form. They need a few starts to build up stamina and push pitch counts. Cole, who debuted on June 19, was quite simply behind schedule.

“There was complete exhaustion,” Cole says of his first few outings, which came amid the heat of summer instead of a chilly New York spring. “And these things are normal; normally, everybody is feeling this in April. But it was freaking June. And there’s a lot of people over the hump at that point.”

Despite missing the team’s first 75 games, Cole notes that his rehab was short, then quickly corrects himself, taking back what he had said. “The ramp-up was not short. The ramp-up was as efficient as we could possibly make it to get back to this level.” In that first big league start, against Baltimore, Cole threw 62 pitches over four innings; his 2023 debut against San Francisco featured 95 and six, respectively.

The idea was never to have the pitcher hit the century mark in his first few starts. Rather, it was to successfully graduate him to the big league level and finish the rehab work under the spotlight. Rehab is a continuum, the pitcher explains. The goal was to raise his floor, not to have him reach for the ceiling. He had dominated during his Minor League rehab starts, but there was no way that environment could match his usual level, both in terms of the emotion and competition. “There’s an aspect of the Major League game -- the physiology, the mound presence, the flow of the game -- that in Minor League rehab situations, it doesn’t translate,” Cole says.

Cole is far from the only Yankees pitcher to have spent some time on the shelf in recent years. Gil filled Cole’s rotation spot after spending two seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery. His first game back on the big league mound, the Dominican Republic native insists, was more emotional than the first start of his career. “You never know how you’re going to bounce back,” Gil says, assisted by Yankees bilingual media relations coordinator Marlon Abreu.

But for a pitcher with Cole’s resume and mound persona, it’s not so easy to bring anything less than 100% to the field. Whatever he told himself about the expectations when he returned to the mound against Baltimore, Cole has never been one to shrug his shoulders and accept his fate. “I’m just trying to compete,” he says. “I know that I might have an abbreviated pitch count. I know I’m not as sharp as everybody else. I’m not in as good of shape as everybody else. I guess you give yourself a little bit of grace, and you go in with a slightly different perspective.”

***

Cortes is always open about his journey to the Majors, the constant need to prove himself as a 36th-round pick. Part of the struggle, he says, is that he couldn’t skip any steps. He had to wait to study the finer points of pitch selection and the evolution of his strategic mental game because he had to keep developing new pitches and making other physical improvements.

Comparatively, he uses Cole as an example. A first overall Draft pick in 2011, Cole has any number of physical gifts. But he also always knew that he would have some runway, an ability to fine-tune his game around the margins in ways that could help him reach even higher levels.

“I don’t want to say it’s easier,” Cortes says, “but when you’re a first-rounder and you get opportunities and you know who you are and what you want to be, you can go through a path that’s a steady incline.”

Easier. There’s that word again …

Rest assured, Cortes isn’t knocking his teammate, nor is he taking anything for granted. He’s just saying that as a low-level Minor Leaguer, a pitcher in Cole’s position can benefit from a level of coaching that late-round picks rarely get. “He’s so much more advanced than the guy that was drafted late, because he’s focusing on things that are being taught here in the big leagues. So, maybe I got introduced to that four years ago, but he got it 13 years ago because that’s who he is.”

The reality is that there’s a façade to greatness. The work is always present, and it’s always hard. Boone notes that he has seen an otherworldly talent such as Judge struggle, and that he never fails to recognize the humanity in all of his players’ successes and failures, even when they’re performing with a machine-like excellence.

To Cole, in good times and tougher ones, it boils down to curiosity, a refusal to settle. The pitcher turned 34 in September, and while he has plenty of years left on his Yankees deal, there’s no doubt that the physical dominance that has been the foundation for his career will be harder to maintain in the years to come. But the curiosity allows him to find new, uncharted roads.

“A lot of the preparation starts way before the day of the game,” he says. “When you get to sleep, what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, how you’re hydrating, how much you’re throwing, when you’re throwing, the quality of your work. And I think when you get into a flow of those kinds of things, a lot of them start to, for better or worse, become autopilot. And then there’s the ability to put a little bit of nuance in there, a little bit of creativity in there, that exploits or turns the results in your favor. Making a really creative pitch in a big spot. You look at that, and it’s like, He threw that curveball, and he wasn’t ready for it, and he struck him out. He had no chance. Well, that curveball was worked on last Wednesday. That mindset has been sharpened over the last four weeks.

“And it’s not always a direct correlation. Sometimes you can put a lot of work in, and it doesn’t make a great change; sometimes it can be very small, and it can be drastic. The process is both enjoyable and exhausting at the same time.”

It’s only when it’s effective that it looks easy, or like autopilot, to use the pitcher’s own word. But no one is harder on Cole than Cole, himself. Through the end of July this season, he had a 5.40 ERA through 35 innings of work. Is it possible that a few more Minor League rehab starts could have had him more ready to dominate big league hitters, to look like the defending Cy Young winner? Probably. But for a first-place team with big goals, the objective isn’t to win the most games in July, it’s to win the most games in October.

And this year, Cole should enter October feeling fresh. Through Sept. 14, his arm had just 79 1/3 innings on it this year, a far cry from the typical mileage after 30-plus starts. “I mean, I’d rather have 200,” Cole says. But he also points out a potential side benefit of his time away, the type of clarity that likely would have eluded him in a normal season.

It wasn’t just that he got the extra family time, as special as that was. It was that being away from the team during the season allowed for a different perspective. When the Yankees would get back from a road trip and he was with his teammates again, having had time to really consider what he had been seeing, he could share valuable insights and observations. And moving forward, he could even do the same thing with himself.

“When we pitch, we not only dump ourselves physically out there, but we do it emotionally, as well,” Cole says. “The stewing on it as a starting pitcher, the negative self-talk afterwards, being down in the dumps -- we know that’s not positive, that it’s not helpful for physical recovery.”

***

If you can make the hard stuff look easy, you know you’re doing something right. And Cole does plenty right. But if, in the process of learning about himself this year, he actually does manage to make certain things easier? Look out.

For everything that the pitcher has already done in the game, he’s still chasing the elusive World Series title, just like most of his current teammates. And so, Cole works endlessly, if often invisibly, to prepare for his highly visible role on every fifth day. Part of that work is on himself, the means by which he makes it all look effortless. But the other side, the imparting of wisdom to his teammates, is just as important.

“I’m not sure if Gerrit has ever given anyone advice on something that he hasn’t been through,” says catcher Jose Trevino. Most of it, of course, is good. There’s a reason, Judge notes, that the Yankees were so aggressive in their pursuit of Cole during the offseason after 2019.

And the team’s manager is well aware of how lucky he is to have Cole back and ready for the season’s most crucial stretch. “Any time we give the ball to Gerrit, we expect good things,” Boone says. “He’s spoiled us with that, certainly.”

If, perhaps, part of being spoiled is occasionally overlooking the greatness, then that’s the price you pay. But Boone remembers Cole’s third start this year, at Toronto on June 30, when the fastball started looking like a Cole fastball, when the command started coming back, when he could see his ace on the mound without needing to squint. Whatever grace notes it took to get to that point, it was all coming into focus. There were tough starts after that, but no pitcher is going to be perfect.

The Yankees don’t need Cole to be perfect. They do need him to look like Gerrit Cole, which has always been more than good enough.

“Even having some of those poor games pushed it along better, quicker overall, to get back to the position where I feel like myself,” Cole says. “You don’t want it to be about taking licks along the way, but everybody’s got to take their licks. You take your licks feeling good, and you take your licks feeling bad. You can be in the middle of the season and give up six runs, and you can be in your second game of the year and give up six runs. Bad days are bad days. And there’s not a whole lot of correlation, sometimes, when those things happen. But looking at the continuum of, ‘We’re here. We want to get back to being myself as quickly as possible and let the chips fall where they may along the way.’”

Being himself. Easy enough. Sorry about that, Gerrit.

“This league is never easy,” he says. “It has never been easy for me in any of my years. And to a certain extent, even though I feel like I’m improving, as well, I feel like the league is improving. It gets harder, in one area or another, every single year I play.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the October 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.