A hot topic during this mid-summer slide for the New York Yankees is their frontline pitcher Gerrit Cole. This year, he’s been prone to terrible blowup starts that leave the Yankees out of games before they can even get into them. There are a lot of theories behind his struggles: his use of foreign substances, different catchers, and being mentally fragile are among these theories. But my theory is far more simple and fortunately enough, easy to fix. When Cole throws his fastball, he pitches well, and vice versa.

Frusturation

It’s a frustrating thing to see a pitcher shy away from what clearly works with the publicly accessible data to support it. Cole’s rise to prominence in Houston was because his fastball added a couple of ticks and started to be used more often. His FA% went from 42% in 2017 to 53% in 2018, this resulted in an ERA drop from 4.26 to 2.88. He rode his fastball to a 9-year, $324 million contract with the Yankees in the 2019 offseason and it’s been a tumultuous road ever since last summer with the substance crackdown coinciding with some bad starts for the Yankee ace, all culminating in a playoff shelling at the hands of the Boston Red Sox.

Trends & concerns

This year has been filled with controversy for Cole--he’s had some terrible starts, his most recent one came last Wednesday against the Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium, where he got tagged for 6 runs off of 3 first-inning homers. It should be worth noting that 2 of those homers were on non-fastballs. These blowups have resulted in him having a 3.51 ERA on August 9th, a dangerously high mark for an ace on a team with championship aspirations. His up-and-down year can be explained as him shying away from his fastball during certain stretches.

Once again, when Cole throws his fastball, he doesn’t give up runs. There’s even data to support this: