Matt Blake – By Jon Schwartz

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

Sweet Relief

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

Some stories age better than others. This wouldn’t end up being my most regrettable feature of 2021 (that would be a tie between my Deivi García feature from the spring, and my Gerrit Cole piece that ran on the morning of his disappointing start in the AL Wild Card Game), but it was a bit of a shame. About the only saving grace here is that the Corey Kluber no-hitter bumped this off the cover, as it would have been a bit embarrassing for this to be on sale all June, when the Yankees’ relievers were going through their roughest patch of the season.

With that said, I do think there’s some good stuff in here, a look at what makes a bullpen great. The Yankees spent 2021 deploying tons of different arms and arsenals, baffling opponents with arm angles and a rambunctious kindergarten class worth of breaking stuff. For all that we talk about speed these days, and all the relievers that throw in triple-digits (and the Yankees have plenty of those), the best recipe seems to be mixing approaches, changing deliveries and just throwing strikes. Up through the point when I wrote this, the Yankees were doing that at a pace about as good as any bullpen in history.

Baseball is changing, and bullpens are more important than ever. Clearly the Yankees have known this for a long time, which is why they had a bullpen with something like five guys who could probably close for a bunch of teams. While they fell off the historic pace, the bullpen was still an incredible strength for the team down the stretch, and figures to be for years to come.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-dominant-bullpen

Patience, Poise and Pinstripes

One of the most remarkable parts of the 2020 baseball season was the emergence of Deivi García. Long one of the team’s top prospects (and a guy I had written about twice before, in different, small ways), García is a slight and unimposing figure, but put him on the mound, and he has this poise and stature that is impossible to ignore.

He debuted in grand fashion in a game against the Mets, looking dominant most of the way, then proceeded to put together a solid if unspectacular campaign. It was good enough to earn him a one-inning start in a postseason game, even if that move proved too cute by half as the Yankees couldn’t pull out that game, then had their rotation scrambled a bit of the rest of the Division Series against Tampa Bay. So it goes …

I spent a lot of time talking with good pitching minds for this story, and really enjoyed my two chats with Deivi and my long interview with Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake. I found it interesting to hear about the things that they worked on to help get the most possible out of the young right-hander (and then, as his 2021 season went up in flames — it was a total disaster that had everyone wondering how the team had ruined him — felt a little less clear about what I had written at the time).

Either way, I really liked learning more about pitching and about Deivi as I reported this story, and was pleased with how it came out. My thesis — that the best thing for both sides would be for Deivi to spend a lot of time in the minors in 2021 … well, I didn’t mean for him to spend that much time on the farm. And I think it’s way too early to write him off for good. That said, 2022 is going to be all kinds of interesting for the young, small right-hander.

https://www.mlb.com/news/yankees-magazine-deivi-garcia-s-bright-future