How Gerrit Cole, Yankees ace, handles the hardest job in the league

NEW YORK — The altitude can be dizzying when you build your home at the height of expectations.

Gerrit Cole spent 28 years working to own one of the most prestigious pieces of real estate in baseball: The ace of the New York Yankees. Here at the summit, though, loneliness pervades the luxury everyone else can see.

“I think it’s the hardest job in the league,” Cole says. “I don’t think there’s a harder place to be the ace. I think it’s the most hunted job in the league and I think it comes with the most weight. The division is a fucking (gauntlet). Above all else, I’m paid to keep us in the game as long as I can and take the ball every single fucking time that I can and charge straight into the fire.”

The home that greatness builds is one in isolation. Those who aspire to legacy spend their entire lives obsessed with the sensation of separating themselves from the pack. But when your position is unique, so is the experience. The demands are different. The interpretation of your performance is different.

“Once you sign a big contract like he did, higher expectations come with the territory,” general manager Brian Cashman said. “His body of work is obviously excellent, but at the end of the day, we are all in it to win the whole thing.”

This is the responsibility Cole chose. In December 2019, he signed a nine-year, $324 million free agent contract with the Yankees — the biggest overall deal ever given to a starting pitcher. In doing so, he announced to the world that he would accept the burden of high expectations in exchange for the privileges of money, status, and one of the most exciting jobs in the world.

He could have signed elsewhere. He could have gone home to Orange County. Instead, the team whose backyard he grew up in might represent his biggest fear: Irrelevance.

“It’d be very nice to be living at home, playing with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani,” Cole said. “I could be spending today grilling burgers and drinking beer and gambling on football games. Instead, I’m here at Yankee Stadium throwing a bullpen at 10 fucking 40 am, but we’ve got the LDS coming up, and I’m pumped.”

On Tuesday night, Cole will take the ball in Game 1 of the ALDS against the Guardians. It’s his third postseason attempt with the Yankees, but this will be his first game in front of the home crowd at Yankee Stadium. This is the job he was signed to do: The regular season results matter, but the postseason is where history — and legacy — is made.

HE KEPT THE SIGN! pic.twitter.com/3E7BDXKESl

— YES Network (@YESNetwork) December 18, 2019

Pitching atop a pedestal is a shaky affair. Suspended in the sky, mistakes can be more consequential than they are from the ground.

Cole has felt acutely the impact of his mistakes this season, especially when the result is a home run. His regular season campaign resulted in 200 innings, 33 starts, 257 strikeouts, and 33 home runs. This all added up to a 3.50 ERA for Cole’s third season as a Yankee.

“I don’t know how to say this delicately, but I don’t like the notion that I haven’t been playing really well this year,” Cole said. “I’m not unaware of the things I have not done well, but as we wrap, it was a pretty good year.”

Innings matter to Cole. Taking the ball every five days matters to Cole. Keeping his team in the game — he only took eight losses for his 33 starts this season — matters to Cole.

Yet his largely successful season would be seen differently if he’d taken a less long-ball-riddled route to get there. His solid season was colored by volatility, the thing most capable of sowing anxiety in those depending on him for stability.

“Because it’s Gerrit Cole and because he came here and signed a huge contract to be the ace of this staff, the New York Yankees staff, nothing will ever be necessarily good enough,” manager Aaron Boone said. “But I think he’s had a very strong year. The home run ball has hurt him a little bit. It’s probably going to keep him from winning the Cy Young and things like that.”

Cole’s larger body of work over the course of the regular season demonstrates general success for the right-hander, but small sample sizes lead to significant effects once the postseason begins. The way to beat elite pitching in October is, typically, with a home run. His ability to minimize those events will likely determine his success or failure.

“Every game that you pitch during the regular season is an opportunity to fine-tune your process and the way you go about your business so that it becomes automatic in situations like this,” Cole said.

Some of Cole’s results this season have been the result of random bad luck. His rate of home runs to fly balls this season was 16.8 percent, just one-tenth of a percentage behind German Marquez, who pitches in Colorado, for highest amongst qualified pitchers. But over the span of a season, consistent bad luck looks like a trend.

His frustration becomes evident when something happens beyond his control. He’s been prone to bad innings throughout the season, marked by batters walking and driving hard-hit balls against him.

“Generally speaking, if a big inning is about to happen, it’s just not being able to minimize the situation, slow the game down and attack productive areas for him,” pitching coach Matt Blake said. “Sometimes it’s trying to avoid the hard contact and we leave the zone a little too much, which leads to kind of some unnecessary walks, and then it opens you up to chance balls that get put into play with guys on base. I think part of it’s just the mental game. He’s as accomplished as anyone out there, but these guys still need to be reminded at times, just the simple things, one pitch at a time.”

In early August, Cole allowed six runs on three home runs in the first inning of a start against the Mariners, then proceeded to throw five scoreless innings to balance out his line. After that outing, he noted that in the moment where the adversity begins to pile up, “maybe there’s a bit of like, taking a step off to regroup, have a conversation with the catcher.”

“Ideally, you’d have some time to simmer down a little bit, assess the situation with a cool head, but you don’t always have that time on the mound,” catcher Kyle Higashioka said. “If things continue to go badly, you just really have to dig deep and kind of eliminate everything that’s happened and just focus in on execution and getting out of that inning.”

Cole’s defining trait as a competitor is his fastidiousness with constantly looking for answers to things that have gone wrong, making the persistent issues with home runs and big innings this year all the more vexing. This is the type of thing that Cole’s meticulous preparation process is designed to avoid.

That’s baseball. Sometimes you play the game, sometimes the game plays you.

As he climbs down off the pedestal every fifth day, Cole returns to a place where he feels steady. Deep in his self-examination and preparation process, his extraordinarily active mind can find the comfort of structure.

There, he assesses what went wrong, what was within his control and what was out of it, and what could be done better for next time. He’s in constant pursuit of improvement, but it is a fickle target that often seems to move more the harder it is chased.

This is Cole’s wiring — he’s not content to try the same approach five days later and hope for better results. He’s looking for a better plan to lead him to success and, crucially, away from moments of failure. It is what helps set him up for greatness. It may also be what sets him up for frustration.

“I feel like after every start, you evaluate what you could and could not have done better, and you prepare yourself for the next one,” Cole said.

As intense as the pressure is on Cole from the outside, it burns just as brightly for the pitcher himself.

“He’s probably more prepared than most starting pitchers just in terms of the detail and the type of information he’s looking for on hitters,” Blake said. “I wouldn’t say he’s overcomplicating the situation, but when he takes the mound, he’s just very aware of who the opponent is.”

While many pitchers want to know things like batter handedness and maybe some plate discipline tendencies, Cole spends his time before his starts studying their outcomes against certain pitches or in certain parts of the zone. When he takes the mound, he wants to be sure that his game plan reflects the most statistically sound path to success.

“You just know that when he takes the mound, there’s nothing more he could have done to be prepared for that game,” Higashioka said. “You know he’s not leaving anything on the table.”

The studiousness of Cole’s preparation means that when, say, Red Sox catcher Reese McGuire hits a home run off a fastball up and in, a part of the zone where he’d had zero hard-hit balls the rest of the season, Cole knows it. He knows that he went to a cold zone in McGuire’s plate coverage and still got burned. He knows that preparation doesn’t guarantee results, but why did the result have to be that?

Cole’s line that night represented the dichotomy of his successes and stumbles this season: He pitched six innings in Boston, allowing four runs on four hits — three of which were home runs. The game was tied when he entered the sixth inning. Xander Bogaerts hit a home run off him toward Pesky’s Pole. He finished the inning. The Yankees won anyway.

As outcomes that Cole found inexplicable piled up over the course of the season, his attention turned toward the inherent randomness of the game on which he’s staked his legacy. A victim of umpire discretion and batted ball outcomes is a difficult place to find yourself when you spend five days developing a plan to reduce the randomness of the outcomes against you.

He references a video he saw of Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright talking with his catcher, Yadier Molina, about having a process, but accepting that things can go “haywire” sometimes. He notes the differences between two wild card games that were played the day prior: In which the Guardians and Rays hit the ball well in a low-scoring game, and the Mariners and Blue Jays hit the ball well for a high-scoring slugfest.

“On any given day, there can be different variables affecting the results,” Cole said. “It makes it baseball. It makes it unpredictable.”

While he enjoys engaging with the ambiguity of the sport, Cole admits it makes it hard to make clean evaluations. The evaluations are what help him process a bad inning or bad day on the mound. They are what give him a fresh start five days later. They are what he uses to try to live up to expectations of him, even if those expectations are extreme.

Cole doesn’t believe it’s possible to be overly reliant on routine and process, though he notes two caveats: “You’re going to need to adjust your process and evolve, and the process doesn’t guarantee great results each time.”

Cole hasn’t thought much about his legacy, he said Monday, the day before his latest postseason run began. If that were the case, would he really drill down into the smallest segmentations of the game to find a framework for success? If legacy were not at stake, couldn’t he have chosen to play somewhere where the pressures — and the financials — would not be so extreme?

“Yeah, but like once you play here, it’s like, who gives a shit about the rest of the league?” Cole said. “The level of commitment to winning here is unchallenged across the landscape of the league.”

In another reality, Cole could be putting up better numbers against worse competition in a market where the fans would mostly just be happy that he chose to be there instead of where he is now. He sees pitching in a dome as a competitive advantage, pitching in a weak division as a competitive advantage, and pitching for a team that is not perennially committed to winning as a miserable trap.

The privileges and pressures in New York are higher than they would be anywhere else, but Cole is wrestling with the burden of expectations from an enviable position. Under contract now, he gets to pitch without another round of worrying about the landscape of free agency and where he fits into it. Scrutiny comes with security. His experience is not pitiable, but it is human.

“I like a fight, I guess,” Cole says. “But just because I like it tough doesn’t mean that it’s not hard.”

But from his perch, Cole still wants what his teammates have: proportional responses to their body of work. He’s pursued greatness his whole life and has become meticulous about the processes he uses to try to get there, but now the barometer for him to be regarded as such is higher than it is for possibly anyone else in the league.

In Game 1 of the ALDS, Cole will get another chance to charge straight into the fire. To find success on this stage, he’ll have to endure the heat.

(Top photo of Gerrit Cole: Paul Rutherford / USA Today)

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