Gerrit Cole doesn’t feel as if he lost his confidence during his recent stretch of inefficiency, but he would like to head into the All-Star break with something to build off of for the rest of the season.
A strong start against his former squad and one of the best teams in the league would be a great way to get that done.
Cole takes the mound against the Astros on Saturday, and will be looking to bounce back from two disastrous outings, having allowed nine earned runs in his last 9.1 innings, further fueling speculation that the Yankee ace will struggle to find sustained success in the post sticky substance world.
But Cole doesn’t see it that way, looking past the league’s crackdown last month and keeping focus on what went wrong in his recent outings, which he doesn’t attribute to a lack of foreign substance. He admits the new enforcements required an adjustment, but more than a month past the point where MLB sent a memo to teams regarding the issue, Cole has moved past it, even if others haven’t.
“At this point, it has nothing to do with the rule enforcement from four or five weeks ago,” Cole said. “There’s ebbs and flows to your delivery as the game goes on and throughout the season, and we have to tighten some things up and we’re trying to do that here…so again, that’s where my focus has been and that’s what we’ve identified as a group as what needs to tick up a bit.”
Cole has pitched to a 5.24 ERA in 34.1 innings since MLB’s memo, and has seen his season ERA rise from 1.78 to 2.91 in that span, while his average rpm on his fastball dropped from 2,517 in May to 2,392 in June. But Cole’s last two outings have been his worst, which he attributes to momentary lapses in execution that he wasn’t able to overcome, like a four-run outburst by Boston in the first inning on June 27.
“That was a really bad first inning and highly opportunistic damage done, and we made pitches and pitched well after that,” Cole said. “The following start, as we continue to dive into it with the Mets, we weren’t forcing the issues enough on the edges of the plate. And continued to miss outside the zone. Those are intent changes, those are delivery focused changes.”
Cole’s focus moving forward will be owning the outer edges of the plate, something he hasn’t done of late, walking eight batters in his last three outings after going through a stretch of 41.2 innings without issuing a free pass earlier this season.
“Really getting the ball into the quadrants that we’re trying to execute so we can make the strike zone look bigger and we can make people change their swing a little bit, put pressure on different parts of the zone,” Cole said. “Trying to make sure we stay aggressive and get count leverage, and when we’re going on the corners, we don’t want to be missing in spaces where it’s a non-competitive pitch or too wide to even serve its purpose.”
That work will begin on Saturday against a potent Astros offense, and will be a chance for Cole to quiet the sticky substance questions and take some much-needed momentum into the break.
“I think it’s an important start regardless,” Cole said. “We have a good team we’re playing against. Somebody that the American league measures themselves against at the top of the league, and a team that if they continue to play well, we’ll have to overcome them in the postseason. And just for us as a group, we’ve certainly had our ups and downs, played a decent series against Seattle, and I think we’re just looking to continue that play into the break as a group, and personally closing the first half on a good note as well, that would be nice.”
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