New York Yankees Ace Has No Cause for Concern Despite Tough Spring Outing

There is no reason to worry about the New York Yankees ace despite a brutal outing in the spring.

Feb 28, 2025; Tampa, Florida, USA; New York Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole (45) throws a pitch against the Toronto Blue Jays during the first inning at George M. Steinbrenner Field. | Dave Nelson-Imagn Images

There have been a few New York Yankees players turning heads during spring training because of their production.

Two of their top prospects, shortstop George Lombard Jr. and outfielder Spencer Jones, have been tearing the cover off the ball and making legitimate cases to be on the Opening Day roster given how many injuries the team is dealing with.

Yerry De Los Santos is also making a push for a spot in the bullpen, taking advantage of injuries there.

Alas, not all performances have been positive during spring training.

One player who was on the opposite end of the spectrum recently is the team’s ace, Gerrit Cole.

Coming off a 2024 campaign that was delayed because of injury, just having him in camp throwing and healthy is an improvement. But the last time he stepped on the mound certainly raised some eyebrows.

Cole faced off against the Minnesota Twins on March 6, and they found some success against the 2023 AL Cy Young Award winner.

They tagged him during his 2.2 innings of work. He allowed five hits, two of which were home runs, and he was charged with six earned runs.

Of course, the statistics don’t count in spring training, as the focus should be on getting work in and seeing how prepared a player is for the regular season.

From that perspective, there is no reason to worry about Cole.

His outing against the Twins looked ugly in the box score, but there was some bad luck involved with his arsenal still rounding into midseason form.

As shared by Pitch Profiler on X, he was working with above-average stuff against Minnesota with a proStuff+ rating of 106; 100 is considered average.

He wasn’t missing as many bats as he would like with a low 15.4% whiff rate, but he wasn’t allowing hard contact either. Despite hitting two home runs, the Twins registered a 0.0% barrel rate against him.

In the outing, Cole threw six different pitches; a four-seam fastball, changeup, knuckle-curve, sinker, cutter and slider. Only the knuckle-curve failed to record a proStuff+ score of at least 109.

Gerrit Cole is going to be just fine pic.twitter.com/n9RBTRqQf5

— Pitch Profiler (@pitchprofiler) March 6, 2025

That knuckle-curve is a new pitch he has been working on this spring.

The exhibition games are being used as a trial run to get a feel for it and see when he can deploy it, if at all, when the performances count.

Cole’s biggest takeaway is that the pitches in his regular arsenal all look great.

The stat line doesn’t mean much of anything in the spring, but seeing him unleashing his pitches at an above-average performance is certainly encouraging.