Gerrit Cole is in an unusual bucket of Yankees’ players entering the upcoming season, as the pillar of stability and excellence is now a question mark.
He’s one of the many things that we don’t know about this team, but I’d argue he’s the most important uncertainty of them all due to his upside.
Even without the outlier fastball he had in this 20s and early 30s, Gerrit Cole is one of the toughest pitchers to crack when he’s at the top of this game.
Constantly evolving, he’s a sponge that absorbs knowledge and applies it to his in-game prcoess seamlessly, but he’s never had to come back from Tommy John Surgery.
It’s hard not to be skeptical about what the Yankees will get from Cole in 2026, but we’re looking to try and figure out what he could contribute in his age-35 season.
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Does Gerrit Cole Still Have His Fastball?
Let’s start by ripping the bandaid off; Gerrit Cole doesn’t have the high-powered four-seam fastball that could rip through lineups on its own anymore.
Age, injury, and fatigue have taken its toll, and the right-hander won’t be able to just spam top-rail fastballs to get whiffs and mow through hitters.
It’s still an effective pitch though, it has strong Stuff+ scores and results while having above-average velocity and shape, and this decline in stuff isn’t catching the former Cy Young winner off guard either.
During the 2024 season Cole threw his four-seamer at a career-low rate (46%) and began pushing more curveballs, cutters, and sliders as an attempt to get some more swings-and-misses.
Gerrit Cole’s cutter is an effective pitch for missing bats and generating soft contact, and while the results on it during the 2024 regular season weren’t great, it’s a big reason why he won a Cy Young Award the year prior.
The shape of his cutter and the velocity are excellent, it sits right in between the fastball and slider in a pitch plot and that’s what makes it so effective.
A second fastball is a good insurance policy for the four-seamer, as hitters have to protect against a different firm shape instead of being able to read out of the pitcher’s hand which pitch is on its way and how to react.
He could be taking this to the extreme in 2026 with a sinker, a pitch he used a lot earlier in his career before ditching it with the Houston Astros and becoming a rockstar.
Something weird happened in 2024 though; the all-gas-no-breaks right-hander started dabbling with the very pitch that he abandoned to ascend into stardom:
The results on that sinker were not good, but the ability to spin the ball into right-handed batters and away from left-handed batters with some zip gave him a different look to show in a count.
He continued throwing that pitch with more of a two-seam shape than a sinker shape in Spring Training before the news of a UCL tear broke, and it’s a pitch that can help him continue to mask a regressing four-seamer.
2025 was the year of the mix, and Gerrit Cole had already been ahead of the curb on that by throwing six different pitches more than 5% of the time during the 2024 postseason.
In short, Gerrit Cole doesn’t have his fastball anymore, but he has gained something incredibly valuable over the years and it’s an understanding of how to adapt, and there’s something else he could be hiding for 2026.
The Yankees Could See Gerrit Cole Unveil This Weapon in 2026
I want to take a trip down memory lane to 2021, where Gerrit Cole set a record for the most strikeouts in a row without a walk as he had pitched better than anybody I had ever seen in pinstripes to open that season.
He had been throwing his changeup significantly more and hitters stood no chance against someone who could command the best fastball in the game arguably, a viscious gyro slider, a big curveball, and an elite changeup.
News would break about MLB cracking down on sticky stuff usage in June, and his changeup went from unhittable to unreliable as that went down.
I imagine the enhanced grip on the baseball allowed Cole to command whatever grip he had been using more reliably, and he’s been chasing that pitch shape and feel ever since.
What if I told you he might have found it again?
During the 2024 season we saw Gerrit Cole throw his changeup more, especially in Game 5 of the World Series where he was using the pitch to turn the Dodgers’ gameplan for him on its head.
He came into Spring Training last year throwing a changeup that more closely resembled in 2021 while using it fairly frequently, which could be a hint at him trying to gain a strong feel for it ahead of the regular season.
Unfortunately the UCL tear put that on hold, and maybe he doesn’t consider revisting the idea again as he gets his body healthy again, but if he can get that changeup shape down he could be impossible to square up.
Until he’s on the mound, Gerrit Cole should be a question mark on this roster and it’ll be hard to gauge how effective he’ll be without getting pitch data to understand how his velocity looks.
That all said, if (big if) he has the stuff we saw from 2023-2024, this should still be one of the best pitchers in the game given the new tools at his disposal.