Cole to bring cutter

When Gerrit Cole takes the mound for the first time in 2022 on Friday against the Red Sox in the Yankees’ season opener, he’ll be featuring a pitch that he hasn’t thrown since he was at UCLA: a cutter.

“I think it’s a good fifth option in certain circumstances,’’ Cole said in Tampa this week, before the Yankees finished spring training.

It was a different spring training for all of baseball, due to the fact it lasted less than four weeks, giving pitchers less time to build up their pitch counts.

Cole was limited to just two Grapefruit League starts. He used the cutter twice on March 27 against Pittsburgh and four times against Detroit on April 1.

“I don’t have anything quite defined with what I want to do with it yet,’’ Cole said. “It’s just another option to get a strike or in games when some other pitchers aren’t working.”

His reasoning behind the addition was simple enough: “I threw it in college. I figured, ‘Why not?’ ”

Asked if it had anything to do with the fact he was less effective in the second half of last season, when MLB cracked down on pitchers using sticky substances, Cole said it wasn’t.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,’’ Cole said. “I’m just getting older, man.”

Last year, his first full season as the Yankees’ ace after 2020 was impacted by COVID-19, Cole relied primarily on his four-seam fastball, slider, knuckle-curve and changeup.

So far, Cole hasn’t broken out the cutter very much and he said he wasn’t sure how he would work it into his repertoire.

“I don’t really know which pitch I’m gonna throw less as a result, but hopefully I’ll select it over several different pitches over the course of a game or season,’’ Cole said.