Tag: Gerrit Cole

The Head and the Heart

(This story originally appeared in the October 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

The first thing I’ll say about this story is that it’s a real bummer that it ended up being somewhat regrettable. It was a piece for our October magazine about how dominant Gerrit Cole had historically proven to be in the biggest, most emotional moments. It dropped on Oct. 5, the morning of his AL Wild Card Game start in Boston.

Then Cole had nothing, the Yankees lost, and there was no reason ever to think about the story again.

That’s a shame, and not just because it would have been fun to see a long postseason run from this team (if only for more opportunities to watch Giancarlo Stanton crush balls to far off planets). But also, there’s a lot in here that I really like. Gerrit is a great interview subject. He is so open about the art of pitching, about how he approaches hitters and what he’s thinking. Yet ever since he got to New York, he’s been mostly relegated to Zoom pressers, where it’s hard to get real emotion and insight.

Talking to him in the Yankees’ dugout, I was really interested in one particular quirk, the way he totally clams up after his best starts. It’s easier to get him to talk after a middling effort than it is when he dominates Shohei Ohtani, and I wanted to know why that was. Over the course of this feature, I think you can see Gerrit kind of gaming it out in his head, trying to figure it out himself.

The other thing that I did here was I tried to get as many individual quotes as possible from people around the game, all of them answering the same question: What is it that Gerrit Cole does best? It’s a simple question, but I wanted a variety of answers, and I got them. I had one person tell me that it’s just that he gets the most strikeouts, another person who said that he’s the most prepared pitcher in the game, and finally, my favorite, a quote about him essentially being the smartest bully. I loved that part of the story, and the way that we designed the piece around those quotes in print.

Cole is signed in New York for years to come, and I have to think that we’ll see better postseason starts from him (we certainly saw some great outings in 2020). I think that eventually we’ll learn that his hamstring was much worse than he let on, and that it impacted him a great deal down the stretch in 2021. Either way, I can’t wait to get more chances to talk baseball with the Yankees’ ace, because he’s a true pitching genius.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-gerrit-cole

Opening the Perfect Present

(This story originally appeared in the May 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Six months later, it’s weird to look back on Opening Day; I had already forgotten that there were just 10,000 fans at Yankee Stadium that day. But the thing is, even that was amazing at the time. After a deeply upsetting year, least of all for baseball reasons, it was completely amazing to be back at Yankee Stadium, listening to real fans have real conversations and real cheers. The “roll call” was incredible.

I chose to write this story backwards for two reasons: First, it’s not super fun to build up to an eventual loss in a publication like Yankees Magazine. It’s not that often I write about a single game for a long, 3,000-plus-word feature, but it’s even less common for me to write about a loss. So since I wasn’t going to climax with some sort of dramatic victory, it made sense to get rid of that fact early.

But I also loved the emotion from the line that I chose to end with, the idea of welcoming fans back to Yankee Stadium. I think that the was the 118th season in Yankees history, so there have been plenty of Opening Days. But I’m not sure there has ever been one like 2021. There certainly hasn’t been anything like a return to baseball after a year spent playing in front of empty seats. So this year’s curtain-raiser was always going to be special, no matter what happened on the field.

There’s baseball in here, sure. There’s a Gerrit Cole start, a Gary Sánchez rebirth, some fun during pregame introductions. But that’s stuff that we can get at any game. The truest joy in here is just writing about baseball, about baseball fans, and about a somewhat normal day at the ballpark.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-2021-opening-day-recap

Baby Steps

(This story originally appeared in the Official 2020 New York Yankees Yearbook.)

Part 3 of my Pandemic Baseball series picks up right where Part 2 left off, and by this point in the season, I’d gotten enough glimpses of the bizarre day-to-day absurdities that the story almost wrote itself. I loved getting to highlight the things that I had never seen before, and would never see again — how about walk-off homers by the Mets at Yankee Stadium, or Yankees relievers scoring the winning runs in games despite never batting, or sacrifice flies to lead off innings?

It was all so weird, and it allowed me to play with a version of a quote that I heard sometime like 400 times during the season: “It’s 2020, man …” I think I got that into the story three separate times, but it’s perfect in its way. The 2020 was real, and the Dodgers’ championship rings are plenty shiny, but everything felt just enough like fantasy to allow us to shake off some of the individual moments. “It’s 2020, man,” was the perfect shoulder shrug in word form.

There’s fun stuff in here. I loved getting to tell the story of Deivi García’s debut and his repertoire with Erik Kratz. I really enjoyed learning that the Yankees were worse in late-and-close situations at home in 2020 than they had been in any year since the new Yankee Stadium opened, which seemed like a fairly clear indication that the special sauce of Yankees fans might be even more important that we’ve thought all these years (and I really loved Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell saying that he would sometimes curse at himself in the bullpen to make up for the absence of fans’ creative vulgarities).

This was a fun series to write. I missed the clubhouse access, and I missed the ability to write about things behind the scenes that fans weren’t seeing. This year, I kind of felt like I was sitting in the same seats as my readers were, which was challenging. But it also allowed me to (and really forced me to) see the game differently. I felt that this year, I was analyzing more than I was unveiling. It was more storytelling than reporting. I had fun with it. That said, I can’t wait to get back into the clubhouse sometime soon.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-2020-season-review?t=yankees-magazine

Anything But Ordinary

(This story originally appeared in the September 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

For Part 2 of my overhead view of pandemic baseball, I focused mainly on the sights and (lack of) sounds in Yankee Stadium. Covering baseball in 2020 was an enormous challenge, with magazine deadlines looming and black pages staring back at you despite next to no access to the players. One of the great joys of writing about baseball is the downtime. As frustrating as it can be sometimes to stand around a Yankees’ clubhouse with 50 other reporters and no baseball players to be found, there’s still so much that we can all learn from getting to chat with players, to make small talk, to ask questions out of view of the entire beat.

Obviously, everyone knew that things would be different in 2020, but as one of very few people who could be in the park during games, I really wanted to give a sense of what it looked and sounded and felt like. I wanted to know how players got themselves amped up, how gameday operations employees tried to get some sound into the atmosphere to trick the players’ brains, and how everyone tried to make the games feel as normal as possible. I also spent time chatting with all the people who made the YES Network broadcasts work despite the announcers sometimes calling games from three time zones away.

I’m proud of this series, and of the way that I think it will stand as a reminder of how weird everything was in 2020, even when we were kind of pretending things were normal again.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-making-2020-baseball-seem-normal?t=yankees-magazine