When Gerrit Cole returns to Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, he will join a losing battle at its darkest moment.
To be clear, this is not referring to the New York Yankees’ 2024 season. Which, despite all fears to the contrary, went very well without the 33-year-old.
Although Wednesday’s game against the Baltimore Orioles will mark the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner’s first start in 2024, the Yankees own the best record in MLB at 51-24. It’s mostly the arms that have carried them, as New York’s pitchers lead the MLB with a 2.99 ERA.
To this extent, at least, Cole can make the rich richer. He simply needs to pick up where he left off in 2023, where he led the AL in innings, ERA, WHIP and WAR.
Ah, but it is in a broader perspective that the biggest challenges lie. The Yankees may be sitting strong, but the concept of ace starting pitchers is under siege and in dire need of Cole’s help.
Your favorite ace is probably having a bad year
To quickly recap where Cole has been, it’s due to inflammation in his $324 million elbow that he’s only now making his 2024 debut.
Although two and a half months is a long time to miss, “inflammation” and “elbow” being in the same sentence don’t always lead to as good results. To wit, 17 major league pitchers have undergone Tommy John surgery since his injury was announced in March.
Which is to say he’s one of the lucky ones in what has been a very bad year for marquee aces.
Whether you’re looking through a list of the best pitchers since 2018 — on which Cole ranks second with 29.7 WAR — or one of the recent Cy Young Award winners, it’s remarkable how many pitchers on either or both do not have been a factor in 2024:
- It remains to pitch: Cole, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Clayton Kershaw, Robbie Ray
- Will not run: Shohei Ohtani, Sandy Alcantara, Shane Bieber, Brandon Woodruff
- Outside of MLB: Zack Greinke, Corey Kluber
It’s a bleak picture, even if you ignore the guys who haven’t played a role the way they’d like. Blake Snell (6 GS, 9.51 ERA) won’t win a third Cy Young Award, and it hasn’t been a banner year for Justin Verlander (10 GS, 3.95 ERA and now two separate stints on the IL) or Kevin Gausman (14 GS, ERA 4.08).
The fact that Gausman is the only one among this group who has not spent time on the injured list only adds to the general sense of hopelessness emanating from all the pitching injuries this year. Even MLB’s most reliable pitchers don’t feel so reliable anymore.
Fortunately, Cole offers some real hope of being a bright spot for the rest. He’s the only one here who has just had the best season of his career and not I just came back from an operation.
Yet the six-time All-Star won’t just try to win one for his fellow aces. All starting players’ eyes will be on him.
The pitch launch is strong. The starting pitchers are broken.
OK, fine, that didn’t happen. all bad to start launching in 2024.
Overall, starters’ share of all pitchers’ WAR is up. And while they’re still nowhere near as common as they once were, starts of six or more innings are also on the rise.
Hell, you could even call it the year of the breakout pitcher.
There are many unusual suspects in the Cy Young Award races, with Tarik Skubal, Luis Gil and Tanner Houck chasing it in the American League and Ranger Suárez and Shōta Imanaga pushing it in the National League.
And we’re all a little bit in love with Paul Skenes, who is gunning for NL Rookie of the Year honors with a 2.29 ERA in seven starts.
Then again, who says a good year for starting pitchers also has to be a good year for starting pitchers?
Among the top 25 starters in 2023, only Logan Webb, Sonny Gray, Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, George Kirby, Corbin Burnes and Luis Castillo were as good or better in 2024. Which isn’t necessarily surprising. There has also been little cross-pollination between the 2023 rankings and the 2022 rankings, and the same with the latter and the 2021 rankings.
Great starting pitchers have become basically interchangeable. And part of the problem, it seems, is that an older generation of aces has not been followed by the next generation.
Consider the list of top starters from the last seven seasons, starting with 2018 and extending to this year. Among the top six, only Aaron Nola has made his major league debut in the last 10 seasons. Among the top 10, none debuted after 2017.
Many guys came in and showed promise only to fall prey to injuries and other career-altering mishaps. Think Walker Buehler. Lucas Giolito. Shane McClanahan. Alek Manoah. Jack Flaherty. Michel Soroka. Spencer Strider. And so on.
Call it an inevitable result of how the broader pitch culture has evolved to become increasingly obsessed with velocity. Its endless pursuit at the highest levels of the sport fuels a destructive cycle at the lowest levels. Youth is no longer a guarantee of vitality, and it is not improving.
“Everyone comes up to me: ‘My kid’s pretty good.’ I’m like, “How old is he?” And they say “7”. And they’re already sending it to places that are just there to increase velocity,” Verlander told Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark of The Athletic. “I’ve always equated the mechanics to how you throw the pace d ‘horse. You are a child. You understand things naturally.”
The fact that the broader starting pitching institute is nonetheless leading a fight against extinction could be seen as the silver lining. But if the institute continues to change its face, again and again, what’s the point?
None of us like the fact that the final numbers are within acceptable parameters. We all want to see guys become stars, stars become superstars, and superstars become legends.
With starting pitchers, anything beyond that first step seems increasingly out of reach.
Is Cole ready to play the Savior?
As bad as the current situation is, there is a version of the future in which it will be even worse. And this is the one in which Cole returns but so as not to be the Cole of yesteryear.
Too alarmist? He’s been the best pitcher the last six full seasons, with a 2.93 ERA overall and ranking in the top 10 in the annual AL Cy Young Award voting. His three minor league rehab outings were decidedly Cole-like. He pitched 12.1 innings and allowed one earned run with 19 strikeouts against zero walks.
Still, the gap between the minors and majors is bigger than before, and Cole’s fastball is worth suspecting. His track heaters in the minors averaged 94.6 mph. That’s 2.1 mph below where it sat in 2023, representing a 1.1 mph decrease from 2022.
The Yankees might actually be in trouble if Cole isn’t his usual self. Although their pitchers are doing just fine without him, their luck with the men on base has started to change and some individuals are not without warning signs. Notably, Gil is already 16 innings away from a new career high and Marcus Stroman has more walks than strikeouts in June.
Apologies for catastrophizing, but it’s hard not to when it feels like you’re watching a certain era disappear in real time.
It was not that It’s been a long time since we had guys like Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez. It was even shorter ago when Roy Halladay, CC Sabathia and Félix Hernández had meetings every five days. And not so long ago, when guys like Kershaw, Scherzer, deGrom and Verlander were in their prime.
What looks like the ace pitcher’s last stand is nevertheless here. And if Cole can’t lead the charge, maybe no one can.
Statistics courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.