POWERED BY COLE
Boone thinks his ace will approach pitching 200 innings this season
DUNEDIN, Fla. — The 200-inning mark is typically a badge of honor for starting pitchers, needing a mix of health and success to reach it over the course of a typical 162-game season.
But coming off a 60-game schedule last year, which raises concerns about increasing workloads too heavily this season, hitting that threshold may be tougher for pitchers across the league. Except for a certain Yankees ace.
“Gerrit,” Aaron Boone said with a sly grin Sunday morning, as in Gerrit Cole, when asked if he could see anyone pitching 200 innings this season.
Cole, who then took the mound and struck out eight Blue Jays over five innings in his penultimate spring training start, insisted he hasn’t set any goal or expectation for his final innings tally this season.
“I haven’t put a number on it,” he said after the Yankees’ 8-3 win at TD Ballpark. “But my goal every year is to go deep into games and make as many starts as I’m asked.”
The Yankees have built up their starting pitching depth entering this season, in part due to the unknown about how those arms will hold up coming off the shortened season. But if the Yankees can count on Cole every fifth day, as they did in his first season in The Bronx, he would certainly figure to have a shot to hit 200 innings, as he has done four times prior in his career.
Cole looked ready and raring to start that marathon on Sunday. He threw 78 pitches, hitting 100 mph and averaging 96.7 mph with his fastball, with the lone blemish coming on a heater left up that Marcus Semien drilled for a solo home run in the fifth inning.
“Gerrit was great,” Boone said. “Had ev
erything going, stuff-wise was really good. I think he had a good amount of adrenaline going, got his pitch count up to where it needed to be and I thought really executed all of his pitches in a pretty good fashion.”
Soon, the question will become just how far Cole can push that workload after a season in which he was limited to 73 innings (plus 18 ¹/3 more in the playoffs).
The biggest jump Cole has made in innings from one year to the next since turning pro came in 2016-17. He threw 124 total innings in 2016, after missing more than a month with a triceps strain, and then came back to throw 203 total innings in 2017. In the following two years with the Astros, he threw 200 ¹/3 and 212 ¹/3 innings in the regular season, plus playoffs.
Cole said that he hasn’t done anything differently this spring to prepare for the bigger jump in innings.
“We’re one start away from being built up at this point and it’s been as normal of a spring as I’ve had in my career,” he said.
In 2019, Cole was one of 15 pitchers who hit the 200-inning mark. All of them had thrown at least 129 2/3 innings the year before.
For now, though, Cole has his sights zeroed in on getting through one more spring start healthy before helping the Yankees begin another run at October.
“There’s a little bit more mental preparation, there’s a little more game-planning in these last two starts going into the regular season,” Cole said. “Just the fact that you have to go five, six [innings] and turn the lineup over two or three times, it just takes a little more focus, a little more buildup to be able to get to that point. At the end, it just demands of you to be more prepared. That’s where we’re at.”