32HAMSTRUNG BY SUCCESS
Severity of Cortes’ injury could have big impact on how good Yankee rotation is
After the year of his life — full-time member of the Yankees’ rotation, 2.44 ERA in 28 starts, first All-Star nod, winning pitcher in a playoff series-clinching victory — it’s fair to say that Nestor Cortes is no fluke.
But as he went from a feel-good novelty to legitimately vexing big-league pitcher, Cortes also shouldered his biggest ever workload. After throwing 65 more innings last season than he had in any other year of his career, Cortes showed up to Yankees’ camp with a Grade 2 strain in his right hamstring. The injury will keep him out of the World Baseball Classic (perhaps a silver lining for the Yankees) but Cortes and pitching coach Matt Blake don’t think it will cause him to miss any of the regular season. Cortes threw a bullpen on Friday morning, already a good sign given that the man himself initially thought he wouldn’t throw off a mound for “a couple weeks.”
The hamstring tweak may very well be remembered as a nothing burger, the type of thing that has no impact on the actual games whatsoever. But it’s definitely not a great start to a year where Cortes is looking to build off last season’s success, not merely duplicate it. On the one hand, Carlos Rodon’s presence in the pitching staff takes some of the pressure off, but if Cortes takes a step back, the depth that is making the Yankees’ rotation look so fierce becomes a bit of a paper tiger. While you can do this with any team, a Cortes regression plus another Luis Severino injury immediately brings the Yankees down a few notches in the American League pecking order.
In other words, Cortes is, in many ways, the linchpin of this pitching staff.
Gerrit Cole is about as dependable as they come, but Rodon and Severino’s injury histories are both long and troublesome, and Frankie Montas is already in danger of missing 2023 entirely. The stability that Cortes provided last year could be much-needed again, depending on how his teammates’ bodies hold up. Everybody wants to see what Cortes can do for an encore, and opponents are going to be eager to tee off on him, only making things more fraught with tension.
One of the biggest differences for Cortes last season was his improvement in ground ball rate, which went hand-inhand with limiting home runs. His cutter also made a major step forward. In 2021, the league hit .271 against it with a .447 slugging percentage. In 2022, those numbers took the elevator a few floors down, landing at .191 and .366. Cortes also threw the pitch more often, something that every hitter who steps in against him will be aware of now.
For someone whose average fastball hums in just under 92 mph, Cortes has to rely on command much more than his velocity-endowed peers. Should that diminish, he turns back into the pitcher that bounced around between jobs in the late 2010s. We won’t know how strong his command is until the season actually begins, and won’t have any real insight into how his cutter is performing until he’s a few starts in, but best believe those are of keen interest to the Yankees’ pitching coaches.
This time of the baseball calendar is all about mystery. Who is going to separate from the pack and take hold of those final, precious available roster spots? Who is this year’s breakout candidate that nobody saw coming? In the case of Cortes and the Yankees, the question is how much, if at all, this hamstring boo boo affects him, but on a larger scale, how a guy who had a 6.72 ERA in his first 42 MLB games will respond to having actual expectations thrust on him for the first time.
Cortes has the type of mental makeup to handle it, but it’s easy to maintain that when you’ve pitched as well as he has over the last two campaigns. Adversity is inevitable, and making adjustments to counteract that adversity is the whole key to excelling in professional sports. Another 25 starts of Cortes excelling likely means the Yankees win something close to 100 games again. A season of him struggling to find his particular brand of alchemy deals a major blow to a team that won two thirds of the games he started in 2022.
Maybe there’s a world where the Yankees can withstand a Cortes backslide into mediocrity, or just the land of disenchanting fourth starters. You also can’t fully rule out someone else on the roster making a Cortes-type leap (Clarke Schmidt is a compelling candidate) and making things easier on the rest of the pitchers.
But as things stand right now, before we know how anyone will look when the curtain rises on Opening Day and beyond, any analysis of the Yankees’ pitching has Cortes as a fairly important figure. Kicking things off with a hamstring injury that derailed his spring plans is not what anyone would have asked for, but then again, nothing in Cortes’ baseball life has ever really gone the way the general population expected.