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Before you dig up all of your superlatives to capture Gerrit Cole’s amazing 2021 launch, the right-hander offered one verbal shrug late Wednesday night.
“I’m not really thinking about it,” Cole said, following his masterful performance that gave the Yankees a 1-0 victory over the Rays at Tropicana Field, of having tallied 56 strikeouts without a walk since an April 12 win over the Blue Jays. “There was a situation today where I was OK with a walk, and we got a chase out of it.”
That would be the Rays’ Yandy Diaz, who went after a full-count slider out of the zone in the fourth inning and missed, preserving this remarkable run of thriftiness without a free pass.
Spare no expense, on the other hand, when it comes to Cole’s first eight starts of the season, his opening quarter if he stays healthy. This is special. This marks a new peak for a guy who already ranked among the game’s elite when he reported to spring training.
“It’s not like he has three or four good games and then a subpar game or a letdown game,” Corey Kluber, the winner of two American League Cy Young awards, said Thursday, before the Yankees concluded their series with the Rays. “It’s pretty much every time out there, he’s doing something that is historic or is on the cusp of being historic. I think raising that level of excellence each time out is what’s most impressive to me.”
Let’s talk historic for a moment:
• Those 56 strikeouts without a walk matches Curt Schilling — who did it in 2002 — but trails Brewers righty Corbin Burnes whose streak was snapped at 58 on Thursday, for the longest such stretch since the mound moved to its current distance in 1893, as per the Elias Sports Bureau.
• Wednesday night became Cole’s third start (out of eight!) when he didn’t allow a run or a walk and struck out at least 12. As per Elias, only two other pitchers have checked those boxes three times in an entire campaign: Sandy Koufax, who accomplished the hat trick in his 36th start of 1965, and Pedro Martinez, who matched Koufax in his 24th start of 2000.
• His third-inning K of Brett Phillips was the 1,500th of Cole’s career, reaching the milestone in his 212th big league game. Only Randy Johnson (206) took less time to do so.
• His 78 strikeouts through eight starts set a Yankees record for the most in that time frame, as per Elias, surpassing Bob Turley’s 72 in 1955.
• How good is Cole’s 26 strikeouts-per-walks ratio? Old friend Phil Hughes, a Southern California native like Cole, holds the major league record among qualified pitchers (one inning pitched for every team game) with 11.6 in 2014.
Now that we looked back, let’s look forward: Virtually every underlying measure shows that Cole’s burst out of the gate is not a mirage. While that doesn’t promise that he can sustain this, it does mean no market correction is imminent.
Baseball Savant, bless those nerds, has formulated a measure called “sweet-spot percentage.” A ball hit at a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees constitutes the sweet spot. Cole’s sweet-spot percentage is 24.8, easily the best of his career in the Statcast era (since 2015). When you factor that, his exit velocity and his strikeouts and walks, Cole’s expected ERA is 1.61, a modest .24 runs above his actual 1.37. Cole’s previous best expected ERA was 2.46 in 2019 with the Astros, the season that landed him $324 million from the Yankees.
“It’s a special one right now,” Kluber said of Cole’s season. “Not that it’s confined to just this year, but specifically this year so far, it doesn’t seem like he’s making any mistakes at all. Pretty much flawless every time out. Eight starts, that’s a pretty impressive stretch to be that good for that long.”
How long can Cole keep it going? The longer he does, the harder it’ll be for him to shrug it away.
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