When Gerrit Cole returns to the mound at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, he’ll be rejoining a losing battle at its darkest moment.
To be clear, this is not a reference to the New York Yankees’ 2024 season, which despite all the concerns is progressing smoothly without the 33-year-old.
Wednesday’s matchup against the Baltimore Orioles will mark the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner’s first start of 2024, but the Yankees boast the best record in MLB at 51-24. New York’s pitching staff is the best in MLB with a 2.99 ERA, and it’s their pitching that’s carrying the team.
To this extent, at least, Cole can make the rich even richer. He just needs to repeat the performance he had in 2023, when he led the AL in innings pitched, ERA, WHIP and WAR.
Ah, but the bigger stakes are in the bigger picture: The Yankees may be in a good spot, but their ace starting pitching concept is in jeopardy and they badly need Cole’s help.
Your favorite ace is probably having a bad year
Here’s a quick look at Cole’s journey so far: He’s set to finally make his 2024 debut due to inflammation in his $324 million elbow.
Two and a half months out is a long time, but having “inflammation” and “elbow” in the same sentence doesn’t necessarily translate into good news: 17 major league pitchers have had Tommy John surgery since news of the injury first broke in March.
So, in what has been a very bad year for big-name aces, he’s one of the lucky ones.
If you look at the list of the best pitchers since 2018 (Cole is second with 29.7 WAR) or the list of recent Cy Young Award winners, you’ll see that either or both Not yet In 2024, the factors that will be driving this are:
- Things we haven’t proposed yet: Cole, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Clayton Kershaw, Robbie Ray
- No sales pitch: Shohei Ohtani, Sandy Alcantara, Shane Bieber, Brandon Woodruff
- Non-MLB: Zack Greinke, Corey Kluber
It’s a tough picture even if you ignore the players who didn’t contribute as expected: Blake Snell (6 starts, 9.51 ERA) didn’t win his third Cy Young Award, and it wasn’t a stellar year for Justin Verlander (10 starts, 3.95 ERA, currently on the disabled list twice) or Kevin Gausman (14 starts, 4.08 ERA).
Gausman is the only one of that group not on the disabled list, but that only adds to the sense of despair that has come from a pitching staff plagued by injuries this year. Even the most reliable pitchers in MLB don’t feel all that dependable anymore.
Thankfully, Cole offers some real hope for the remainder of the season, as he is the only player coming off the best season of his career. do not have I’m back from surgery.
Still, the six-time All-Star won’t just be trying to win a championship for his fellow ace pitchers — the entire starting rotation will have their eyes on him.
The starting pitchers are strong. The starting pitchers are broken.
Okay, that’s not true. all He won’t be a good starter in 2024.
Overall, starting pitchers are making up a larger share of total pitcher WAR, and while starting pitchers are less common than they once were, the number of pitchers starting six or more innings is on the rise.
In fact, this could even be the year of the breakout pitcher.
The Cy Young Award race is full of unusual contenders, with Tarik Skubal, Luis Gil and Tanner Hoak in the American League running, and Rangers’ Suarez and Shota Imanaga in the National League running.
And we’re all kind of obsessed with Paul Skeens, who has a 2.29 ERA in seven starts and is in the running for National League Rookie of the Year honors.
But who’s to say that a good year for a starting pitcher is a good year for a starting pitcher?
Only six of the top 25 starters in 2023 performed equally or better in 2024: Logan Webb, Sonny Gray, Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, George Kirby, Corbin Burns and Luis Castillo. This isn’t necessarily surprising. Similarly, there was little cross-influence between the 2023 leaderboard and the 2022 leaderboard, or between the latter and the 2021 leaderboard.
Good starting pitchers have become essentially replaceable, and part of the problem seems to be that the older generation of aces isn’t being replaced by the newer generation.
Let’s look at the list of the best starters from the past seven seasons from 2018 to this year. Of the top six, only Aaron Nola made his major league debut in the past 10 seasons. Of the top 10, none have debuted since 2017.
There are plenty of promising players who have been forced into retirement due to injuries or career-ending misfortune: Walker Buehler, Lucas Giolito, Shane McClanahan, Alec Manoah, Jack Flaherty, Michael Soroka, Spencer Strider, to name a few.
This is almost an inevitable consequence of pitching culture as a whole becoming increasingly obsessed with velocity. The endless pursuit of velocity at the highest levels of the sport creates a destructive cycle at the lowest levels. Youth is no longer a guarantee of a pitcher’s vitality, and it’s not getting better, much less better.
“People come up to me and say, ‘My kid’s pretty good,’ and I say, ‘How old is he?’ and they say, ‘Seven years old,’ and they’re already sending him to a facility just to get his velocity up,” Verlander told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Jason Stark. “I’ve always equated the pitching motion to the gait of a horse. You’re a kid. You just naturally figure things out.”
That the broader institution of starting pitching is fighting extinction can still be seen as a bright spot, but what’s the point if the institution keeps changing faces again and again?
None of us are happy just because the final numbers are within acceptable limits. We all want to see players become stars, stars become superstars, and superstars become legends.
For starting pitchers, getting beyond that first step feels increasingly out of reach.
Is Cole qualified to play the savior?
As bad as things are now, there’s a version of the future that’s even worse, and this is a version of the future where Cole is back, but he’s no longer the Cole he was.
Is that too much of an exaggeration? He’s been Cole’s most consistent pitcher over the past six seasons, posting a 2.93 ERA and finishing in the top 10 in annual AL Cy Young Award voting. His three minor league rehab games were decidedly Cole-like: 12.1 innings, striking out 19, walking zero and allowing one earned run.
But the gap between the minor leagues and the major leagues is bigger than it used to be, and Cole’s fastball is questionable. His average fastball in the minor leagues was 94.6 mph, 2.1 mph lower than his 2023 record, which is 1.1 mph lower than his 2022 record.
The Yankees could have real trouble if Cole isn’t in his usual form. The Yankees’ pitching staff has fared well without Cole, but their luck when it comes to getting on base has begun to change and certain pitchers are not without warning signs. Notably, Gill is 16 innings shy of a new professional record and Marcus Stroman has walked more batters than he strikes out in the month of June.
Sorry to exaggerate, but it’s hard not to feel that way, as if you’re watching an era pass by in real time.
It wasn’t. that It’s been a long time since we had players like Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, it’s been even longer since Roy Halladay, CC Sabathia and Felix Hernandez were scheduled to play at least one game every five days, and it’s been even longer since players like Kershaw, Scherzer, deGrom and Verlander were in their primes.
It feels like a last stand for an ace pitcher, but still, it’s here — and if Cole can’t lead the offense, maybe no one can.
Statistics provided by Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.
