The Yankees' Gerrit Cole Returns to Fight Against MLB's Scariest Trend (2024)

When Gerrit Cole returns to toe the Yankee Stadium rubber on Wednesday, he'll be rejoining a losing battle at its bleakest moment.

To be clear, this is not in reference to the New York Yankees' 2024 season. Which, despite all fears to the contrary, has gone just fine without the 33-year-old.

Though Wednesday's tilt with the Baltimore Orioles will mark the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner's first start of 2024, the Yankees boast MLB's best record at 51-24. It's mainly the arms that have carried them, as New York hurlers lead MLB with a 2.99 ERA.

To this extent, at least, Cole can make the rich even richer. He merely needs to pick up where he left off in 2023, wherein he led the AL in innings, ERA, WHIP and WAR.

Ah, but it's in the bigger picture where the greater stakes reside. The Yankees may be sitting pretty, but the concept of ace starting pitchers is under siege and badly in need of Cole's help.

Your Favorite Ace Is Probably Having a Bad Year

To quickly recap where Cole has been, it's because of inflammation in his $324 million elbow that he's only now making his 2024 debut.

Though two-and-a-half months is a long time to miss, "inflammation" and "elbow" being in the same sentence doesn't always lead to such good outcomes. To wit, 17 major league hurlers have undergone Tommy John surgery since the initial news of his injury broke in March.

This is to say he's one of the lucky ones in what's been a very bad year for name-brand aces.

Whether you peruse a list of the best pitchers since 2018—on which Cole ranks second with 29.7 WAR—or one of recent Cy Young Award winners, it's remarkable how many pitchers on either or both haven't been a factor in 2024:

It's a grim picture even if you ignore the guys who haven't been factors in the way they would like. Blake Snell (6 GS, 9.51 ERA) won't be winning 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 IL stints) or Kevin Gausman (14 GS, 4.08 ERA).

That Gausman is the only one among this bunch who hasn't spent time on the injured list only adds to the general feeling of hopelessness emanating from all the pitching injuries this year. Even MLB's most reliable pitchers don't feel that reliable anymore.

Mercifully, Cole offers real hope of being a bright spot the rest of the way. He's the only one here who's coming off the best season of his career and not coming back from surgery.

Still, the six-time All-Star won't merely be trying to win one for his fellow aces. The eyes of all of starting pitcherdom will be upon him.

Starting Pitching Is Strong. Starting Pitchers Are Broken.

OK, fine, it hasn't been all bad for starting pitching in 2024.

Heck, you might even call this the Year of the Breakout Pitcher.

There are unusual suspects aplenty 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 for it in the National League.

And we're all a little in love with Paul Skenes, who's making a bid for the NL Rookie of the Year with a 2.29 ERA through seven starts.

Then again, who says a good year for starting pitching must also be a good year for starting pitchers?

Of the top 25 starters in 2023, only Logan Webb, Sonny Gray, Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, George Kirby, Corbin Burnes and Luis Castillo have been as good or better in 2024. Which isn't necessarily surprising. There was likewise little cross-pollination between the 2023 leaderboard and the 2022 leaderboard, and ditto with the latter and the 2021 leaderboard.

Great starting pitchers have basically become interchangeable. And part of the problem, it seems, lies in how an older generation of aces hasn't been followed by the next generation.

Consider the list of the best starters for the last seven seasons, starting with 2018 and extending to this year. Of the top six, only Aaron Nola made his major league debut within the last 10 seasons. Out of the top 10, none debuted after 2017.

Plenty of guys have come along and shown promise only to fall prey to injuries and other career-altering mishaps. Think Walker Buehler. Lucas Giolito. Shane McClanahan. Alek Manoah. Jack Flaherty. Michael Soroka. Spencer Strider. And on and on.

Call it an inevitable outcome of how the broader culture of pitching has evolved to become increasingly obsessed with velocity. An endless pursuit of it at the highest levels of the sport feeds a destructive cycle at its lowest levels. Youth is no longer any guarantee of pitching vitality, and it's not getting better.

"Everybody comes to me, 'My kid's pretty good.' I'm like, 'How old is he?' And they're like, '7.' And they're already sending him to places that are just there to increase velocity," Verlander told Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark of The Athletic. "I've always equated mechanics and how you throw to a horse's gait. You're a kid. You naturally figure things out."

That the broader institute of starting pitching is nonetheless putting up a fight against extinction could be seen as the bright side. But if the institute keeps changing faces over and over and over again, well, what's the point?

None of us get any enjoyment out of the numbers on the bottom line being 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 feels increasingly out of reach.

Is Cole Up to Playing the Savior?

As bad as things are now, there's a version of the future in which they're even worse. And this is the one in which Cole returns only to not be the Cole of old.

Alarmist much? He was the most consistently great pitcher of the last six full seasons, pitching to a 2.93 ERA overall and placing in the top 10 of the AL Cy Young Award voting annually. 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.

Yet the gap between the minors and the majors is greater than it used to be, and Cole's fastball is worthy of suspicion. His tracked heaters in the minors averaged 94.6 mph. That's 2.1 mph below where he sat in 2023, which was a 1.1 mph decrease from 2022.

The Yankees could actually be in trouble if Cole isn't his usual self. Though their pitchers got by just fine without him, their good fortune with men on base has begun to turn and certain individuals are not without warning signs. Notably, Gil is already 16 innings away from a new professional high and Marcus Stroman has more walks than strikeouts in June.

Apologies for catastrophizing, but it's hard not to when one feels like one is watching a certain era become bygone in real time.

It wasn't that long ago that we had guys such as Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez. It was even shorter ago when Roy Halladay, CC Sabathia and Félix Hernández were appointment viewing every fifth day. And still shorter ago when guys like Kershaw, Scherzer, deGrom and Verlander were in their primes.

What feels like the last stand of the ace pitcher is nonetheless here. And if Cole can't lead the charge, maybe nobody can.