Sometimes, destiny winds up unfulfilled. Or you just misread the signs all along.
Nevertheless, in a sport in which one team has won nearly 25 percent of the championships, the tale of Gerrit Cole already stands out. It could do so all the more by next spring if events don’t turn a certain way over the winter:
An elite starting pitcher and lifelong Yankees fan … doesn’t pitch for the Yankees?
Not yet — not for a lack of trying on the Yankees’ part — and maybe never. For the moment, the Yankees are less interested in wooing the right-hander and more focused on walloping him.
Cole, the Yankees’ first-round draft pick in 2008 and a free agent upon the completion of this season, will try to continue his remarkable 2019 campaign when he starts American League Championship Series Game 3 for the Astros on Tuesday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. The 29-year-old hasn’t registered a loss since May 22, a stretch of 24 starts during which he has compiled 251 strikeouts, 34 walks and a 1.66 ERA over 162 ⅓ innings.
“He obviously is a great pitcher,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman said of Cole. “I think we recognized that he was a great pitcher. Obviously, he was a No. 1 pick. Had great stuff. Certainly one of the game’s best this year, for the last two years.”
For Cashman and the Yankees, Cole represents the one who got away … twice. A third and perhaps final opportunity will present itself this winter, although based on what has transpired recently for both parties, you wonder whether the best chances for a union already have passed.
This tale of two baseball ships passing in the night starts with Cole’s childhood in Southern California, where he followed the lead of his father, Mark, who grew up a Yankees fan in Syracuse.
“They used to show me the photos of him when he was young,” said Mike Grahovac, Cole’s coach at Orange Lutheran High School. “… There was actually one of him down on the right-field line at the old Yankee Stadium, him and his dad down there.”
“I think I attended seven games [at the old Stadium],” Cole said Monday in a news conference at the new Stadium. “My favorite players were Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera.”
Mark Cole’s professional success in the consulting business ensured that his son, who established himself as the country’s top high school pitcher in 2008, would be anything besides a hardship case as the amateur draft approached, and Gerrit Cole signed a letter of intent to pitch for nearby UCLA. No draft spending pool existed then, meaning that teams could invest as much as they wanted without penalty, and Cole chose the aggressive Scott Boras as his adviser. That explains why Cole dropped all the way to the 28th pick, where the Yankees selected him.
“Realistically, when it came time to pick, he was by far the best guy on our board,” said Damon Oppenheimer, the Yankees’ vice president of domestic amateur scouting. “There was a big drop between him and the next guy. Though we didn’t have the secure knowledge that he was going to sign, with the knowledge of him loving the Yankees, I thought we had a good shot. It was worth a shot to take him at the time.”
“I thought for sure he was going to sign, just because it was the Yankees,” Grahovac said.
“I thought for sure he was going to sign, just because it was the Yankees.” — High school coach Mike Grahovac
The deadline to sign stood in mid-August, about a month later than teams and players currently have to agree to terms.
“At the time, you knew the landscape. It would come down to the end,” Oppenheimer said. “You go in and you make your best effort toward the end. When we got down to where it was getting closer to the end, it became apparent, after a conversation with Gerrit’s dad, that they just decided it was best for Gerrit to go to UCLA.
“They weren’t going to entertain an offer from us. We had numbers we were prepared to go to that would’ve been very attractive.”
The most obvious comparison was New Jersey right-hander Rick Porcello, whom the Tigers selected 27th overall out of Seton Hall Prep in 2007 and paid $7.28 million to forego his college commitment to North Carolina.
“Obviously we didn’t get the signability right. He just wasn’t signing, period,” Cashman said. “The scouting side was good. We scouted it right.”
The Yankees received a compensatory pick in the 2009 draft.
Three years later, the Pirates took Cole with the first overall selection of the draft — the Yankees’ first pick of 2011 came at No. 51, 50 turns too late — and Cole lived up to his billing as he reached the big leagues in 2013 and placed fourth on the 2015 National League Cy Young Award ballot.
The next two seasons, however, Cole’s performance dropped from excellent to merely good. With his service time and salary rising and the Pirates requiring an infusion of younger talent, Pittsburgh shopped Cole. The Yankees and Astros, who had just faced off in the 2017 American League Championship Series, emerged as the top two suitors.
Befitting of Cole’s most recent production, neither club went gaga over him. The Yankees refused to include third-base prospect Miguel Andujar, offering outfielder Clint Frazier as the top chip. The Astros meanwhile, proffered a package featuring none of their top prospects. That package — major league pitchers Michael Feliz and Joe Musgrove and infielder Colin Moran, along with minor league outfielder Jason Martin — sat untouched for about a month before the Pirates accepted it in January 2018.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Cashman said. “Pittsburgh obviously liked what it was getting from Houston more.”
Musgrove and Feliz have been adequate for the Pirates, Moran and Martin less so. Frazier has shown off a strong bat, weak glove and shaky personality for the Yankees. And with the Astros, who have proven whizzes at improving pitchers, Cole reached a whole new level. He made a strong case this season for the AL Cy Young Award.
“Rarely do we use the term ‘Ceiling of a No. 1 [starter], which he has turned out to be,” Oppenheimer said. “We thought he could be a No. 2. I don’t think people that had him at the big-league level before Houston thought he could do what he was doing now. Doing that at age 17, 18 would be a little too arrogant.”
One more projection on Cole will be called for this winter, when Boras will surely seek out a nine-figure contract starting with a 2, if not a 3, for his client. Astros owner Jim Crane has cast doubt on whether his club can afford to re-sign Cole, although the chairman has said an Astros title this month would help with the dollars.
Cole is said to be exceptionally happy in Houston, with his wife, Amy, and parents also enjoying it, so maybe he will push Boras to find a way to make the status quo work. Or perhaps he will look to get closer to home, with the Los Angeles Angels a distinct candidate to shop in the high-rent district this winter.
“It’s definitely going to be west of Nevada,” Astros outfielder Josh Reddick told the Houston Chronicle of Cole’s next stop.
Nevertheless, “I would think the Yankees would have a little bit of pull in his heart,” Grahovac said, and we all know the Yankees have room for Cole in their starting rotation. Do they have room for him in their budget, however? With the very notable exception of Giancarlo Stanton, who has become yet another cautionary tale, the Yankees have shied away from huge investments to individual players in the last five years.
“I’ve thought about it,” Cole acknowledged, when asked if he contemplates how his career would’ve been different as a Yankee. “ … As of the last two years I have not thought about it, though.
“… Obviously I got drafted by them so I thought about it then. And all the rumors going around it’s kind of hard to control what you hear. But as of late, it’s just been not a thought at all.”
Virtually everyone else will be pondering it, though. Where will destiny take Cole next? The Yankees must know this: As much as his absence of pinstripes already haunts them, it could get even worse, starting Tuesday afternoon.