UNLIKELY RISE OF NESTOR
How the legend of Cortes grew from 30th-round pick to nasty Yankees starter
Even before the three seasons of Rookie ball, the Rule 5 draft, the first time getting designated for assignment, the season of frequent shuttling between Triple-A and the majors, the second DFA, the trade, the outright waivers off another 40-man roster and rejoining the Yankees organization for a third time on a minor league contract in 2021, Nestor Cortes’ improbable rise to becoming one of MLB’s top pitchers this season almost never got off the ground.
To begin that long road in professional baseball, Cortes needed to get drafted and signed. And on the weekend of the draft in June 2013, 30 rounds came and went without Cortes hearing his name called.
So around the same time Cortes turned off the draft tracker on his computer, thinking his chances were busted, Carlos Marti planted himself outside of a bathroom in the Yankees’ complex in Tampa to wait for scouting director Damon Oppenheimer. Marti, at the time an area scout for the organization who also had coached Cortes on a summer travel team, wanted to make one last push to draft the 5-foot-10, left-handed pitcher out of Hialeah High School in Florida whose fastball averaged 89 miles per hour.
“I thought, ‘It’s now or never,’ ” Marti, who was baseball coach at Hialeah before Cortes went there, said. “That [conversation] will be etched in my brain forever.
“I go, ‘Damon, this kid I know is a late [pick]. He’s not a big kid. I know he doesn’t throw hard. He’s not very impressive to look at. But this guy’s gonna get a lot of outs.’ … I was nervous as hell.”
Oppenheimer asked him whether he would bet his career on the pick, according to Marti.
“I just really think he can help us,” Marti told Oppenheimer. “I know he’s not the biggest and the strongest and he doesn’t throw the hardest, but he can pitch. In a world where all we’re drafting is guys that throw hard, it’s good to have a guy that can pitch.”
“It was a hard sell,” Marti added. “Drafting Nestor, I thought I was gonna get fired.”
But Marti was convincing enough that six rounds later, after enough players on the Yankees’ board had been scooped up by other teams, they drafted Cortes with the 1,094th overall pick.
It took another month, including a last-minute workout with Cortes
‘and
“He’s that guy that you go see once you’re like, ‘Eh, that’s cool. He’s pretty good,’ but you see him go through everybody and you’re like, ‘OK, this is pretty good.’ ”
pitching against Yankees minor leaguers, for the organization to sign him. They settled on a signing bonus of $85,000, which was just enough to sway Cortes from going to junior college and trying to get drafted again in a year.
Nine years later, with a roundabout route to get to The Bronx and stay there, Cortes can smile while reliving his decision.
“I told myself, ‘I’m going to sign and see what happens,’” Cortes said this week. “I signed — and thankfully so.”
TO land a spot on the summer team that changed his trajectory, Cortes first had to show what he could do on the mound as a junior in high school. And to do that, he had to convince his dad to let him pitch full-time.
Cortes had pitched growing up and threw occasionally as a sophomore on Hialeah’s junior varsity team. But he was mostly a right fielder and first baseman, until the Thoroughbreds were in need of arms going into his junior season. Making Cortes one of their starting pitchers required a conversation with his father.
In South Florida, baseball is played year-round, which often leads to over-use of developing arms. Cortes’ dad had concerns about his son getting burned out by high school coaches, and the more visible summer-ball circuit was increasingly becoming more important than the high school season anyways.
But Shane Fulton, who had taken over the Hialeah High program from Marti in the baseball-rich city outside of Miami, assured Cortes’ father that they would take care of his son, a pledge that secured his blessing. So Cortes began pitching about every third game for Hialeah — with the staff sticking to strict pitch counts — and playing in the field on the other days, showing off his glove, athleticism and baseball IQ. Soon enough, he became the team’s No. 1 pitcher, exhibiting no fear as he stifled some of Hialeah’s toughest competition, all while throwing an 82-85-mph fastball. “You didn’t look at him and go, ‘Wow, this kid’s special,’” Fulton said. “You watched him and you knew he was a competitor and he was smart and he commanded his pitches. His velo wasn’t overwhelming by any means, but he’d get wins. He’d always keep us in the game, always threw strikes and the guys got behind him.” Even on days when Hialeah didn’t have games, Cortes could typically be found at a park watching other games.
“Had he not had the success that he’s had, I think Nestor would be playing in a men’s league somewhere down here,” Fulton said. “He just loves baseball.” Fulton coached a summer travel team, too, but already had a crowded group of pitchers lined up for that year. So Marti, who
knew Cortes since he had him on a team of seventh and eighth graders in 2009 but got to know him better as a high school junior, found a spot for the lefty on the team he coached, the Florida Legends.
“The cool thing about that team is we’re a charity, so guys like Nestor that didn’t have two nickels to rub together could play and go around the country,” Marti said of the program, which also counts Yankees first baseman Anthony Rizzo and Padres star Manny Machado among its alumni.
THAT summer in 2012 is when Cortes worked his magic. Watching Cortes pitch one game might not do the trick. Take a front-row seat to see him throw over the course of a summer, though, and he leaves a lasting impression.
“He’s that guy that you go see once and you’re like, ‘Eh, that’s cool. He’s pretty good,’ ” Marti said. “But you see him go through everybody and you’re like, ‘OK, this is pretty good.’ ”
Marti’s team made it all the way to the Connie Mack World Series in Farmington, N.M., where Cortes pitched against a Midland team out
of Cincinnati that featured future MLB hitters Andrew Benintendi and Max Schrock. The stadium radar gun showed Cortes’ fastball sitting around 85 mph.
“They just couldn’t hit it,” Marti said. “It wasn’t like they were out in front or he was fooling them. No, no. He was going right at them at 86, and I remember thinking, ‘Does this guy have an invisiball?’ ”
That was the moment when Marti, as a scout, knew he had something special in Cortes — especially the way the 17-year-old performed in front of a crowd of 9,000-plus.
“I knew he wasn’t scared,” Marti said. “That was the thing about him that I loved. … Most guys stumble there big-time, and he didn’t. He was better.”
It set in motion the push that Marti would make the following June to get the Yankees to draft Cortes.
“I think ever since that time, people appreciated the stuff I did,” Cortes said. “I guess the talent was there, but not the velo or the projectable stuff. If you see a high school player that’s 6-[foot]-4, 6-5, throwing 88, chances are he’s going to throw 95 by the time he develops and gets into a real program. But the fact that I was throwing 83-85
— Carlos Marti, ex-Yankees area scout and Cortes travel team coach
and still getting swing-and-misses, I feel like [Marti] pushed for me because of that. He saw that I played with my heart on my sleeve and I was a competitive player. I feel like he went with his gut.”
STILL, even after the strong summer and an uptick in velocity as a senior, the only other scout at all of Cortes’ starts besides Marti was one from the White Sox.
Marti’s scouting report on Cortes was prescient. He believed Cortes would be able to pitch off his “swing-and-miss” fastball. He described him as a “likable kid” and “very competitive.” Marti’s best grades for Cortes (on the 20-80 scouting scale) came on his intangibles such as competitiveness, confidence and character rather than any specific pitch or physical attribute.
Ultimately, Marti pegged Cortes as a potential back-end starter. And when describing his comfort level with the player, he said he would put his house on it.
That belief in Cortes came through again on the final day of the draft, when Marti fought for him to get picked.
“The hard part was drafting him, but even the harder part was getting him signed,” Marti said.
Cortes wanted to sign, but he also wanted to make sure he got as much money as he could. In the month that followed the draft, he played for Marti’s summer team again to try to boost his stock.
The deadline for draft picks to sign in 2013 was July 12, and a few days before then, the Yankees called Cortes to ask him to come to Tampa for a workout. Cortes took them up on it, pitched against a few of the Yankees’ lower-level minor leaguers and “tore them up,” Marti said, with then-assistant scouting director John Kremer among those watching.
After the workout, Cortes and his parents went to get lunch at a local bakery and waited for a call. When it finally came, the Yankees offered him $75,000. Cortes’ parents left the decision up to him.
Through his agent, Cortes told the Yankees he was going to turn it down and go to junior college at Miami Dade. The team and agent then went back and forth with calls before the Yankees bumped their offer to $85,000. Cortes thought about trying to hold out for more, but didn’t want to risk the Yankees pulling their offer.
“I thought to myself, ‘This is the only thing I know how to do,’ ” Cortes
said. “If I go to school, I live 45 minutes away. With the whole [routine of] waking up at 5 a.m., going to school, work out, class, afterschool practice, get home at 6, rush hour — maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have quit on what I was doing or wouldn’t have had the grades or my discipline wouldn’t have been — I’m 18 years old, God knows what could have happened.”
Marti credited Oppenheimer for believing in his scouting acumen and Kremer, who pushed for the signing after the workout.
“Then obviously after that, it’s just on Nestor,” Marti said. “He took the little opportunity he had, and he’s done such an amazing job with it.”
SO began Cortes’ long, winding journey to success with the Yankees. The path that Cortes took just to get drafted and signed may have prepared him better than the typical 36th-round pick — a round that no longer exists in the MLB draft, which lasts 20 rounds as of 2021 — for the bumpy road ahead. Nothing ever came easy before he was a professional baseball player, so the grind through the minor leagues and then the churn of transactions just to stick in the majors did not deter him.
“My mom always said I had to be on time with everything, and my dad always told me if I commit to something, I gotta finish it or do it until I fail or succeed,” said Cortes, who was born in Cuba, but moved with his parents to Florida when he was 7 months old. “I think those two life lessons that they showed me kind of helped me throughout my minor league career.”
The emergence of Cortes’ cutter, of course, also helped. As did his crafty methods of changing arm slots and deliveries within the course of an inning or even an atbat to further deceive hitters.
Through it all — parts of eight seasons in the minor leagues — his fighter’s mentality remained. It is why, even after he broke out last season, he called Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake during the offseason to ask whether he had an outside chance of making the team.
“I’m a 5-10 lefty that throws 90 miles per hour, so I feel like I always gotta prove myself,” Cortes said in the final days of spring training. “Not only prove it to the fans, but prove it to myself. I think I owe it more to myself where I need to be the same guy every year in order to have a job in this industry.”
Nine starts into the season, with a 1.70 ERA, Cortes has quieted the questions about whether his
2021 was a flash in the pan. Instead he’s been even better.
“The sky’s the limit with him,”
Marti said. “I just want him to be able to finally get paid a little bit and take care of his parents. I know that’s a big deal to him.”
Cortes will be arbitration-eligible for the first time next season. Continuing to pitch well this year will only help his case to earn a bigger payday in 2023 (he’s on track to exceed the estimated $1.7 million he’s made over his first five major league seasons combined), not to mention help the Yankees get where they want to go in October.
For now, though, Cortes just keeps winning over teammates and fans with his underdog story.
“I tell my class all the time, if Nestor walks in with a ladder and a maintenance shirt, no one’s gonna blink an eye,” said Marti, whose position was eliminated by the Yankees in 2018, but still teaches government and economics at Hialeah High. “Now if [Aaron] Judge or [Giancarlo] Stanton walk in with a ladder, everybody would be like, ‘Who are these monsters?’ But that’s part of his charm. That’s why I think he’s such a fan favorite because so many people can be like, ‘He’s just like us.’ He’s not the biggest, he’s not the strongest, but right now, he’s literally one of the best pitchers in baseball, which is so cool.”
“I’m a 5-10 lefty that throws 90 miles per hour, so I feel like I always gotta prove myself.”
— Nestor Cortes