February 27th, 2024: Grapefruit League, Bellinger, Cole

Putting a bow on the leadoff hitter poll: 37% of RAB readers want the Yankees to employ a platoon atop the lineup to begin the regular season. That narrowly edged out DJ LeMahieu (33%). Gleyber Torres was third (27%), with Anthony Rizzo and Alex Verdugo far behind him (4% combined). I voted Gleyber. Put your three best hitters in the 1-2-3 spots and get them all to the plate in the first inning. LeMahieu will almost certainly be the leadoff hitter to begin the season. Hopefully he hits. And if he doesn't, I hope the Yankees are quick to adjust. Let’s get to today’s post as 2023 20th rounder Bryce Warrecker finds himself on Pitching Ninja.

1. Grapefruit League observations. The Yankees opened their Grapefruit League schedule Saturday, so Friday was a light workout day. They brought several pitchers over from minor league camp to throw live batting practice – Top 30 Prospects Kyle Carr, Brock Selvidge, and Luis Serna were among them based on the beat reporter tweets – and they had a team bonding event/ping pong tournament in the afternoon. Luis Torrens won. Apparently he’s quite good at ping pong.

Four games into Spring Training, the Yankees are 3-1, and they scored at least nine runs in each of the three wins. They were shut out and one-hit in the loss, so the 2023 demons haven’t been fully vanquished yet, but the vibes are excellent right now. So much better than last spring, when we were all wondering why we should expect the Yankees to be better. May this feeling last until November.

The Yankees hung 22 runs on the Tigers in their first game Saturday and Spencer Jones hit a 470-foot bomb (video). He is 5-for-5 with a walk in the early going this spring and he’s yet to swing and miss (40 pitches seen). See? The Yankees were smart not to trade him for Corbin Burnes! Jorbit Vivas has two homers too (video). Getting the two best players in the Trey Sweeney trade would be something.

Aside from the Jones homer, the highlight of the weekend was Juan Soto’s loud three-run home run off the scoreboard Sunday (video). Elevated fastball and he was all over it. It’s amazing how some hitters, you can see they’re on the defensive and just trying to survive at the plate. With Soto, he controls at-bats. Has since he was a 19-year-old with the Nationals. What a hitter, man. I’m so happy he’s a Yankee.

The new uniforms don’t look too bad on television, though I’m glad the Yankees don’t have names on the back of their jerseys. The new lettering looks amateurish. The pants being see-through is a problem even if MLB is pretending it isn’t. Tommy Kahnle, Mr. Tightpants himself, complained the pants are too tight. Imagine how uncomfortable those pants must be if Kahnle’s complaining?

I had planned to write something about Giancarlo Stanton’s alleged new swing, but a) something came up Monday and I couldn’t get to it, and b) Stanton swung only five times in Monday’s game anyway. That was his Grapefruit League debut, so we don’t have many swings to look at. I’ll dig into Stanton in Friday’s post. Here now are some thoughts and observations from the first few Grapefruit League games.

Rodón debuts (and also breaks out a new pitch)

All eyes will be on Carlos Rodón this spring after the season he had in 2023. He’s slimmed down and the early reports have been glowing, but we need to see him in games, and Rodón’s spring debut Sunday was very encouraging. His fastball averaged 93.6 mph and touched 96 mph, up from where it was in his lone outing last spring, and everything looked more fluid and less effortful. He looks healthy (video).

“That’s one of the things that we’ve seen that we’ve really liked since the start: he put his body in a good position to be in better position to do the things he wants to athletically,” Aaron Boone told Gary Phillips after Rodón’s outing, not so subtly calling out his (lack of) conditioning last season. “I definitely think there’s a little more efficiency to the delivery than certainly we saw at this time last year.”

Rodón briefly lost the strike zone in the second inning – he hit a batter and also fell behind 3-0, worked it back full, then issued the walk to two consecutive batters – and he surrendered a homer to Alejandro Kirk, the last batter he faced and one of the few Blue Jays regulars on the trip. The homer came on a cutter, a new pitch Rodón is working on. Lucas Apostoleris made the horizontal vs. vertical movement graph so I didn’t have to, and yeah, the cutter is a distinct pitch. It’s not a misclassified slider.

“I just pulled it across the zone. I’m trying to find that line with that cutter. I just started throwing it. I’m trying to figure out where I want to start that pitch,” Rodón told Phillips about the cutter Kirk hit out. “… It’s still developing. Just building confidence in it. I just need more reps with it.”

Rodón added he started toying with the cutter late last year and he’s comfortable enough with it to use it during the regular season – “What’s the worst that can happen?” he told Phillips, apparently forgetting Kirk’s homer – so we’ll see where this goes. Spring Training is when guys mess around with new pitches and not all of them become part of the arsenal. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. We’ll find out.

Overall though, I thought Rodón looked good Sunday. Better than he did at any point last year just in terms of the ball jumping out of his hand and his delivery looking athletic rather than forced. It’s one start in Spring Training, so let’s not declare Rodón capital-B Back yet. Sunday was a good first step and nothing more. It was what I wanted to see after last year’s disaster. May this be the start of something and not just a spring mirage.

“I had a positive outlook from the day,” Rodón told Phillips. “I thought I threw well. Obviously, there’s things I can get better at and hopefully carry on to the next start and improve.”

Stroman and Cortes debut as well

Rodón and Marcus Stroman made their Grapefruit League debuts at the same time about 17 miles apart Sunday. Stroman got tagged for three runs (two earned) in 2.1 innings and got “rolled” in the second inning, meaning a reliever had to finish the inning and Stroman then came back out for the third. I wouldn’t sweat it. Stroman looked like a veteran going through the motions on Feb. 25th.

“I’m just trying to dial in my mechanics,” Stroman told Erik Boland after the game. “... I felt good in spurts today. It just wasn’t over the (52) pitches. I just need to increase my consistency in feeling good in my mechanics more often. I just feel like it was probably maybe around 25-30 pitches today out of the (52).”

Nestor Cortes made his Grapefruit League debut Monday and it had been a while since we last saw him on a mound. Nestor made one start after May last year. He started against the Mariners on May 30th, went on the injured list with a rotator cuff strain a few days later, returned to make a start against the Astros on Aug. 5th, then he went right back on the injured list. One start in the last four months! Sheesh.

Anyway, Cortes looked strong Monday, striking out four in 2.2 innings (video). He allowed two runs, though that had more to do with the defense behind him than Nestor pitching poorly. Soto had a ball pop out of his glove on a dive (no more diving in Spring Training, Juan), Anthony Volpe botched a potential double play ball, and DJ LeMahieu had a hard chopper smack him in the face. It’s Spring Training for the gloves too.

“The pitches were really crisp. Threw to locations I wanted to throw. And most important, got out of there healthy. So a big step forward,” Cortes, who sat 92.2 mph and touched 94 mph, told Phillips after his start. “... I’m pretty confident (the injury is) behind me. I already passed that phase. Maybe like November, December, I did wake up feeling a little achy or worried about where I was at. It’s been a non-issue for a good month now.”

The key with Cortes is how he feels Tuesday and the days between starts. He said he wasn’t recovering well between starts last year, which led to the injured list stints. Nestor said he felt good after his live batting practice session last week and that’s great, but games and live batting practice are different animals. Lots more adrenaline in games, even meaningless exhibition games. Fingers crossed he comes away fine.

Weaver’s new delivery

When the Yankees re-signed Luke Weaver, I figured they had something in mind to help him improve on last year’s 6.40 ERA (5.61 FIP) in 123.2 innings with three teams (including the Yankees). Leaning on the cutter he brought back at midseason seemed obvious enough, and maybe they’d change his slider grip or something like that. I did not expect Weaver to rework his delivery. The before and after:

Alrighty. Weaver’s hands are up around his chest now, and, most notably, his leg lift is gone. It’s a slide step toward the plate rather than a full windup, even with no one on base. Yoshinobu Yamamoto uses a similar slide step and he started doing it just last year. Maybe this is the new thing about to sweep across baseball? Replacing the full windup with a slide step even with the bases empty? Hmmm.

Weaver’s stuff was largely the same Sunday – his fastball was down a few ticks but still within the range of what you’d expect early in Spring Training – so that new delivery didn’t come with a big uptick in velocity or movement or anything. Not yet, anyway. Weaver faced eight batters, threw 25 pitches, and got one miss on eight swings. He might’ve thrown more pitches in the bullpen afterward to continue building up.

Hopefully one of the reporters in Tampa talks to Weaver and/or Matt Blake about this new delivery soon and we’ll learn how it helps, what the reasoning is, etc. This isn’t a small change! Eliminating a leg lift seems like a pretty big deal. I’m curious to know what’s going on and see where this leads, if anywhere.

Up next

Here are the upcoming starting pitchers between now and Friday’s post:

• Tuesday at Rays: Clarke Schmidt (Rays TV)
• Wednesday: off-day
• Thursday vs. Marlins: TBA (YES app only)

Chase Hampton and Will Warren are both on Tuesday’s travel roster, so we’ll see them after Schmidt. Hooray for that. Warren and Schmidt being on the same schedule is not entirely a coincidence, though I don’t think Warren is being given a chance to win the No. 5 spot. This keeps Warren (and Hampton) in line for a split squad day in two weeks, and also for the Spring Breakout prospect showcase on March 16th.

Thursday is officially TBA, though Boone told Phillips it’s likely to be Clayton Beeter. Gerrit Cole will then make his spring debut Friday at home against the Blue Jays. Also, Thursday is a night game (6:30pm ET). First night game of the spring. That’s what’s coming up.

Miscellany

It has only been two games and five plate appearances, but Anthony Rizzo looks good. Good swings, looks comfortable in the box, no signs of lingering post-concussion symptoms. That doesn’t mean they’re not there. Only that, if they are, we haven’t seen them yet. “I’ve been feeling great, physically and mentally … Until you take the training wheels off and go full speed, that’s when you know,” Rizzo told Bryan Hoch … George Lombard Jr., last year’s first round pick and my No. 8 prospect, hit an opposite field homer Sunday (video). He hit it against a Double-A pitcher and not a particularly good one (sorry, Jimmy Robbins), but still, that’s an impressive blast by a kid who won’t turn 19 until June. “It was nothing short of amazing,” Lombard told Hoch after the game. The kid certainly looks the part in a uniform … Boone shed some light on the plan with Oswaldo Cabrera’s switch-hitting. He told Greg Joyce they’re going to sit down with Cabrera before each series and tell him which lefties to face right-handed and which lefties to face left-handed. That seems a bit convoluted? Might be better to just rip the band-aid off and commit to hitting lefty full-time, and work on that rather than spending energy working on a righty swing that won’t get much mileage. I dunno … Aaron Judge has worked out some at first base this spring, though it was mostly to break up the monotony of Spring Training rather than preparation for a position change, he told Brendan Kuty (subs. req’d). Judge did say he’s willing to play first base in an emergency though. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that … And finally, the YES Network updated their Spring Training broadcast schedule. In addition to every home game, YES will also broadcast five road games, the Spring Breakout game, and the two Mexico City games. I count only four remaining games that won’t be broadcast this spring: March 4th at Marlins, March 9th at Twins, March 14th at Tigers, and March 23rd at Tigers (split squad). We’ve come a long way from maybe three or four spring games being televised. Here’s the Grapefruit League broadcast schedule.

2. Bellinger re-signs with Cubs. It felt like the best fit for both the team and player since the start of the offseason, and Cody Bellinger is officially heading back to the Cubs. The Cubs get a much needed middle of the lineup bat – they needed another bat even with Bellinger last year – and Bellinger gets to stay with a team that should be good, a coaching staff he’s familiar with, and where he revived his career.

The contract: three years and $80M, with opt outs after each year. Bellinger gets $30M in 2024, $30M in 2025, and $20M in 2026. It’s essentially Carlos Correa’s first contract with the Twins, minus a little money because Correa was younger and didn’t have Bellinger’s 2021-22 on his resume. If things go well, Bellinger will re-enter free agency at age 29 next offseason. If they don’t, he has a $50M insurance policy.

The short-term deal worked out for Correa – he agreed to two $300M+ contracts the following offseason – until his ankle became a concern. For Bellinger and Scott Boras, this is an L. It’s a 28-year-old former MVP coming off a season that earned him MVP votes settling for another prove yourself contract. There are valid reasons to be skeptical of Bellinger. There’s also upside, and Boras failed to turn that into a larger payday.

You could argue the Yankees would’ve been better off with Bellinger on that contract than trading for Juan Soto. They’d still get the above-average high contact lefty bat, plus Bellinger is a better positional fit as a true center fielder who would have kept Aaron Judge in right, and the Yankees would still have Mike King and Drew Thorpe. (Consider Jhony Brito and Randy Vásquez the equivalent of the draft pick compensation the Yankees would have surrendered to sign Bellinger.)

This was not a simple either/or though. Bellinger was not willing to take a short-term contract in December, otherwise he would have signed weeks ago, and the Padres were not waiting until Spring Training to trade Soto and his money. It was either trade for Soto when the Padres were ready to move him in December, or wait out Bellinger’s market and try to beat the Cubs in a bidding war. Soto was the right move. Plus he’s the better hitter. The Yankees needed a legit difference-maker on offense. That’s Soto.

I don’t know if the other top Boras clients – Matt Chapman, Jordan Montgomery, Blake Snell – are open to similar short-term contracts. Those three are all over 30 and a short-term deal is a tougher sell. Bellinger can at least go back into free agency in his 20s. Correa may have taken a short-term contract a few years ago, but age 30+ Boras clients like Kris Bryant and Marcus Semien did not that offseason.

If the Yankees can get Snell (or Montgomery, if that’s who they prefer) on a contract similar to Bellinger’s, they should be all over it. You’ve got Soto for one guaranteed year and Judge and Gerrit Cole only have so many peak years remaining, so put the best possible team on the field no matter how much luxury tax you have to pay. This is nothing you haven’t heard before. If Snell’s (or Montgomery’s) price drops, other teams will get involved, but the Yankees should pursue him aggressively. Very aggressively.

For what it’s worth, Bob Nightengale says the Yankees won’t consider a big money short-term contract for luxury tax reasons, which, if true, tells you where their priorities are (they’d rather do a long-term deal and saddle themselves with a player’s decline years than pay luxury tax). Last week Hal Steinbrenner gave his annual “I’m still willing to consider anything that comes my way” speech. That’s one of Hal’s go-to answers and, the last few offseasons, it meant the Yankees were done. They never followed up with a move.

Hopefully the Bellinger signing breaks the seal and the rest of these unsigned free agents find homes soon, because I’m kinda sick of talking about free agents. If the Yankees sign Snell (or Montgomery), great! If not, I’m sure I’ll feel disappointed, though I can’t say I expect the Yankees to make another move. That 110% luxury tax rate hits hard.

3. How Cole can improve in 2024. Not much went right for the 2023 Yankees, but Gerrit Cole certainly did. The $324M man was the unanimous AL Cy Young winner and he led the league in innings (209), ERA (2.63), ERA+ (165), WHIP (0.98), and WAR (+7.4), among other things. Cole was the first Yankee to win the Cy Young since Roger Clemens in 2001 and only the sixth Yankee to win it overall.

Cole will try to become the first AL pitcher to win back-to-back Cy Youngs since Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000. There have been a lot of repeat winners in the NL since then though. Tim Lincecum (2008-09), Clayton Kershaw (2013-14), Max Scherzer (2016-17), and Jacob deGrom (2018-19) all won the NL Cy Young in back-to-back years since Randy Johnson won four straight from 1999-2002. Huh.

Anyway, despite all those NL repeat winners, it’s hard to win back-to-back Cy Youngs, and it’s really hard to improve on a Cy Young season. It’s not impossible though. The case can be made 2023 wasn’t even Cole’s best season. By FanGraphs WAR, 2023 was tied with 2021 for his third best season (+5.2 fWAR) behind his two years with the Astros (+7.5 fWAR in 2019 and +5.9 fWAR in 2018).

There may be some natural regression coming Cole’s way in 2024. For example, did you know he allowed four doubles in the second half? Four in 92 innings! Cole allowed 22 doubles in 117 first half innings. One double every 23 innings is not something I would expect to continue. Also, here are Cole’s home run rates in the last three seasons:

• 2021: 1.19 HR/9 and 13.5% HR/FB
• 2022: 1.48 HR/9 and 16.8% HR/FB
• 2023: 0.86 HR/9 and 9.4% HR/FB

Cole had the fifth highest HR/9 and second highest HR/FB% among qualified pitchers in 2022. In 2023, he had the seventh lowest HR/9 and the fifth lowest HR/FB%. Quite a turnaround! Will it continue? I hope so, but it would be neither surprising nor disastrous if Cole’s home run rate crept above 1.00 HR/9 again (it was over 1.00 five times in six years from 2017-22). Outlier home run rates are how you win Cy Youngs.

Natural regression may be coming, though there are also ways Cole can improve in 2024, as difficult as that would be. I’m gonna try to figure out a few ways Cole can improve anyway. Here are three ways the reigning AL Cy Young winner could be even better this coming season.

Incorporate the cutter a bit more

As recently as 2021, Cole did not have a cutter. He picked up the pitch in Spring Training 2022 and brought it in the regular season, though it wasn’t working well, so Cole abandoned it at midseason. The cutter returned in 2023. Sparingly in the first half and then regularly enough in the second half that it was Cole’s third pitch for a good chunk of time as he put the finishing touches on his Cy Young campaign.

Cole’s cutter was effective in an admittedly limited sample. He held hitters to a .271 AVG and .390 SLG (.303 xwOBA) on the pitch, better than the .268 AVG and .446 SLG (.337 xwOBA) league averages for cutters. Cole threw it almost equally to righties and lefties too. What he did not do is throw it to both sides of the plate. It was a gloveside pitch only. In on lefties and away from righties. The 2023 heat map:

For what it’s worth, Cole said he wants to continue developing the cutter into a reliable weapon, telling Gary Phillips it is “just in the infant stages of being developed to a certain extent” in December. He specifically said he wants to throw it to both sides of the plate. Cole developing a Mariano Rivera-esque front door cutter to righties for called strikes would be incredible. What a fun pitch that is.

“The break is obviously a different break from the slider and the fastball,” Cole told Phillips about the cutter. “And I think the next element – the next step there – is going to be the command. I mean, we want to use this ultimately to both sides of the plate, just like we use all the other pitches.”

Cole already has four quality pitches (four-seamer, slider, curveball, changeup) and, unlike Clarke Schmidt, he doesn’t need the cutter. Schmidt needs the cutter to combat lefties. For Cole, it could be just another weapon, something that either gets him to another level or helps him maintain his current level as he gets deeper into his 30s. The cutter could be a nice in-between look to complement the fastball and slider.

Marry strikeouts with weak contact

It speaks to how good Cole is that he a) won the Cy Young, and b) had one of the 10 highest strikeout rates in the league despite also having one of the largest strikeout rate declines in the game. Nearly 200 pitchers (189 to be exact) threw 100 innings in both 2022 and 2023. Here are the largest strikeout rate and swinging strike rate declines among those 189 pitchers:

Strikeout Rate
1. Cristian Javier: -10.0% (33.2% to 23.2%)
2. Adam Wainwright: -6.4% (17.8% to 11.4%)
3. Justin Verlander: -6.3% (27.8% to 21.5%)
4. Gerrit Cole: -5.4% (32.4% to 27.0%)
5. Martín Pérez: -5.3% (20.6% to 15.3%)

Swinging Strike Rate
1. Shane Bieber: -3.4% (13.8% to 10.5%)
2. Corbin Burnes: -2.9% (15.1% to 12.2%)
3. Gerrit Cole: -2.6% (14.3% to 11.7%)
4. Kevin Gausman: -2.6% (15.5% to 12.9%)
5. Tony Gonsolin: -2.6% (12.3% to 9.7%)

Obviously the strikeout rate decline didn’t hurt Cole, and the trade-off was improved contact quality. He cut his barrel rate and increased his pop up rate, so rather than strikeouts, Cole often got weak pop ups, which are BABIP killers. They are close to automatic outs. That also helped him cut down on the homers despite an increase in balls in play. The balls Cole did allow to be put in play were more favorable for him.

Still, Cole went from an elite bat-misser, a guy who fanned 34.9% (!) of the batters he faced from 2018-22, to merely above-average in 2023. Is it possible Cole could marry his 2023 ability to limit hard contact with, say, a 30% strikeout rate? At the end of the day, strikeouts are the best thing a pitcher can get, especially in high leverage situations (situations Cole was excellent in last season, to be clear).

One downside of strikeouts is the pitch count. You need at least three pitches to strike a guy out. For Cole, one of the game’s great workhorses, I don’t think this would be a problem. He averaged 4.11 pitches per plate appearance with a 32.4% strikeout rate in 2022. In 2023, it was 3.99 pitches per plate appearance with a 27.0% strikeout rate. The MLB average was 3.89 pitches per plate appearance last season.

The difference between 2022 Cole and 2023 Cole was one extra pitch every eight batters or so, and he averaged 25 batters per start last year. Three or four additional pitches per start, basically. Maybe one fewer batter faced. Is that a big deal? Maybe it is when you’re counting on Cole to spare the bullpen every five days. The difference is not enormous though. I don’t worry about Cole’s efficiency.

It’s possible Cole won’t be able to combine last year’s ability to avoid hard contact with a higher strikeout rate. He pitched down in the zone more often last season, especially with the fastball, and one way to increase the strikeout rate is to elevate four-seamers. I wouldn’t bet against Cole though. He’s so smart. Adding a few more strikeouts to last year’s contact management would make him even better.

Work the pitch clock

This last one is a stretch because, well, Cole is amazing, and I’m not smart enough to come up with any other ways he could possibly improve. Like everyone else, Cole had to adjust to the pitch clock last year, and it’s safe to say he made that adjustment with ease given the season he had. Statcast’s pitch timer stats are imperfect, but here’s what we have:

Tempo is the average time between pitches within an at-bat and timer equivalent is simply tempo minus six seconds, which is the MLB average time between the pitcher receiving the ball (pitch clock starts) and the pitcher starting his delivery (pitch clock ends). Again, imperfect, but it’s what we have.

I am all for quick workers and a brisk pace of play, but the numbers suggest Cole has a little wiggle room within the pitch clock rules. Another 2-3 seconds to recover between pitches, to mess with the hitter’s timing, etc. Tempo gradually increased league-wide as last season went on, indicating pitchers grew more comfortable with the allotted time. Cole’s as smart as they come. I’m sure he’ll figure out a way to further use the clock to his advantage, if it’s even possible.

(Reminder, the pitch click is 15 seconds with the bases empty, and this year it’s 18 seconds with runners on base, not 20.)

* * *

It’s entirely possible Cole will have a worse season in 2024 than he did in 2023, but still be excellent and in contention for the Cy Young. It’s hard to be better than he was a year ago. Not impossible, just hard. Cole is one of the few pitchers with the talent to improve on a Cy Young season though. He has so many weapons and he’s so smart. Maybe it’s the cutter, maybe it’s something else. Whatever it takes to improve, I’m sure Cole’s working on it.

“He’s already knee-deep into finding ways to be better,” Brian Cashman told Greg Joyce about Cole at the GM Meetings in November. “How much better can you be than what he just did? But that’s how he’s wired.”

(Send your requests for Friday's mailbag to RABmailbag at gmail dot com. The random Yankee series is on hiatus, but feel free to send in requests for when it returns.)