Unsure if he even had a job, Cortes is now Yankees best pitcher
BALTIMORE — In an uncertain moment this winter, Nestor Cortes called Matt Blake, the New York Yankees’ pitching coach. Cortes had pitched to a sub-3.00 ERA over 93 innings in 2021, an effective guarantee of his job security. But his career had conditioned him to worry.
Maybe fireballers and high-price free agents relax in the offseason. Pitchers drafted in the 36th round who navigate three franchises and the minor leagues over nearly a decade, who deploy a fastball that scrapes the low 90s, cannot.
“Am I on the inside looking out?” Cortes asked Blake. “Or am I on the outside looking in?”
Tuesday afternoon, two days after he produced his latest pitching masterpiece, Cortes ran sprints across the sun-drenched Camden Yards outfield, firmly on the inside. In the season’s first month, Cortes made himself one of MLB’s best pitchers and most remarkable stories. On a best-record-inbaseball roster studded with all-stars, MVPs and Cy Young Award candidates, the player with the thirdmost Wins Above Replacement (per Baseball-Reference) is a thrice-rejected, stocky, mustachioed, sawedoff lefty with one of the slowest fastballs in the majors.
Cortes was discarded by the 2018 Baltimore Orioles — a team that would lose 115 games — after two weeks. Three years ago, the Yankees swapped him with the Seattle Mariners for a small sum of cash to spend on international players. The Mariners let him walk after one season.
Cortes is the major leagues’ ERA leader, perched at 1.35. He has struck out 49 hitters while allowing just 23 hits and 11 walks over 40 innings. Two starts ago against the Texas Rangers, he carried a nohitter into the eighth inning. He validated it six days later with an eight-inning, threehit, one-run, seven-strikeout cruise against the Chicago White Sox.
In an era dominated by raw power, Cortes operates like a snake charmer. Of 144 pitchers who have thrown at least 20 innings, per FanGraphs, Cortes ranks 134th in average fastball velocity at 90.6 mph. He thrives on precision and funk. He changes arm angles, varies the speed of his windup, hides the ball in his delivery and works like he has a dinner reservation to make. He pitches with a spin rate that makes geeks weakkneed and a flourish that makes longtime fans fall in love with the game all over again.
“He’s really identified what he does well, and he’s not scared to do it,” Blake said. “Some guys maybe are looking around, trying to be someone else. He’s really authentic in who he is.”
In baseball, prototypical pitchers must prove they do not belong on a roster. Outliers must prove they do, over and over, and Cortes is an outlier. He discovered what made him good, figured out what was holding him back and refined himself until he became, at least for six weeks, one of the best pitchers in the world.
“You’re supposed to have many chances when you are 6-5 and throw 97,” Cortes said. “At some point, when it does click, you’re a potential all-star. As far as a guy being 5-11, throwing 92, there might be second doubts, which is normal. There are times when I second doubt myself: ‘How am I blowing this guy away with 89 or 90?’ ”
It is tempting to consider Cortes a throwback to the days before velocity conquered the sport, a testament to the durability of craft in a game upturned by analytical insight. In truth, Cortes unlocked the dominant version of himself with the data-based instruction of a Mariners minor-league coach, and his arsenal is a study in what modernized front offices want, velocity notwithstanding.
“It’s actually a nice blend of the two,” said Blake, a 37-year-old steeped in modern pitching tenets. “He has some classic, qualitative traits in his deceptiveness and his guile and his ability to drop down and change angles that you don’t really see a lot of starters do anymore. On the other side, if you look at him analytically, he does a lot of things really well in the modern game.”
Cortes’ style and excellence have earned him the nickname “Nasty Nestor” and a cult following. When he emerges from the dugout, at Yankee Stadium or on the road, he hears fans scream his name. People even have started to notice him on the streets of New York.
“I feel like it’s the mustache, though,” he said, laughing. “I don’t feel like people see this style of mustache every day.”
Over the past year, Cortes has not only paced a rotation that includes Gerrit Cole, a $324 million free agent and two-time runnerup in Cy Young voting. He has erased the inherent skepticism with which the baseball world views pitchers such as him.
“It’s for real,” Manager Aaron Boone said. “It’s real.”
Born in Cuba, Cortes grew up in baseball-mad Hialeah, Fla., and attended the same high school as former Washington Nationals pitcher Gio Gonzalez, another short, left-handed starter. He looked up to Gonzalez, who donated equipment and worked out with the team in his offseason. Cortes started to notice pro scouts behind the plate during his final season at Hialeah High, but he had committed to Florida International and considered Miami Dade College as a backup.
“The expectations for him getting drafted was a maybe kind of thing,” said Juan Garcia, a longtime neighbor and close friend who played with Gonzalez and now coaches Hialeah High. “Given his size and what’s expected of pitchers nowadays, we were like, ‘I don’t know, man.’ ”
As the 2013 draft neared its end, Cortes got a call from Carlos Marti, a Yankees area scout who also worked at Hialeah High. Cortes was 10th on the list of players the Yankees wanted to draft, Marti told him, and there were nine rounds left. Fifteen minutes later, Marti called back — other teams had scooped up some of the names ahead of Cortes, and the Yankees were taking him in the 36th round.
Simply “grateful to have a baseball in his hand after high school,” Garcia said, Cortes refused to compare himself with other pitchers, even as he spent three seasons in rookie ball.
“I was watching these guys with so much talent just give up,” Cortes said. “I told myself, ‘I’m going to do this until the team doesn’t want me anymore, or any of the 30 teams don’t want me anymore.’ ”
At Class AA, he talked with hitters on his team who suggested he could overcome his lack of velocity by messing with the hitter’s timing. He had dropped down sidearm on some pitches since high school. He started toying with differing speeds in his delivery, either a rapid fire or pausing in the middle, standing on the mound like a flamingo.
“He was a little worried because he was like, ‘I don’t know if they’re going to accept this, if they’re going to allow this, if they’re taking it as a joke,’ ” Garcia said. “He knew the velocity gets you the money in baseball. He knew that he just had to find a way to stay there.”
The Yankees did not add Cortes to their 40-man roster after the 2017 season, which left him unprotected in the Rule 5 draft even after he had posted a 2.06 ERA over three minor-league levels. The Orioles selected Cortes, meaning they would hold his contractual rights for six years if they kept him on their major-league roster for the entire season.
Cortes believed his chance had arrived. In the minors, he had always told himself he could post a 4.50 ERA over 150 innings in the majors. In Baltimore, he relieved in four games. He yielded 10 hits, two home runs, four runs and two walks and struck out just three hitters.
“Once I got to the big leagues and I saw what it was like, I was like, ‘I can’t even throw an inning up here,’ ” Cortes said.
The Orioles returned him to the Yankees, where he again excelled in Class AAA. He scuffled when given an extended major league stay in 2019. The Yankees traded him that fall to the Mariners for $28,300 in international bonus spending — basically nothing.
When the pandemic hit, Cortes returned to Hialeah and threw bullpen sessions in his front yard. He began the restarted season with the Mariners and struggled again. An injury sent him to the Mariners’ alternate site, where a collection of minorleaguers kept in shape. He found a coach and asked a pointed question.
“Tell me what I did in the minor leagues that helped me be so successful,” Cortes told him, “and what I’m doing now that’s not correlating.”
Rob Marcello Jr. was selected by the Philadelphia Phillies in the 17th round of 2013 draft — 19 rounds before Cortes. He lasted one minor-league season before he decided he couldn’t make the majors. “Being a player took a toll on me,” he once said. He went into coaching, and by 2020, at 29, the Mariners named him the pitching coach at Class AAA Tacoma.
In the late summer of 2020, Cortes found Marcello and asked for help. “It takes some courage for a player to even say that,” Marcello said. Using a high-tech camera and reams of analytical information, they studied the details of his pitches. His cutter and change-up showed traits of being major-league average. His fastball offered no distinct challenge to big-league hitters.
“You want to look for some unique characteristics that can carry a guy to the big leagues and have him stay,” Marcello said. “With Cortes, he’s not a guy who’s ever going to throw 95 to 99, so let’s take that off the table. What can we do to make his fastball a little bit more unique?”
Cortes already had experimented with different arm angles, but it wasn’t enough. What would happen if he gripped the ball differently?
Marcello turned the baseball into a clock. Cortes naturally gripped the ball off to the side, his middle and index fingers pointed at 10:45. Marcello suggested he try moving to 11:30, more behind the ball. The grip created more and straighter backspin, creating an effect coaches refer to as “ride” — it remained on the same vertical plane for longer than other pitchers’ fastballs.
The camera and computer spit out information: The spin rate, tilt, release height and release angle, which had all been underwhelming with the 10:45 grip, suggested Cortes now deployed a fastball that could retire major league hitters. In scrimmages at the alternate site, hitters took confused swings. Cortes gained more conviction and threw harder, his velocity inching up a mile per hour or two.
“It breeds that confidence in a player that they’re missing, when all the things are checking the box,” Marcello said. “Numbers are saying yes, and their eyes are saying yes. They’re like, ‘Maybe this pitch does work.’”
Blake, who arrived in New York during the year Cortes spent in Seattle, saw him as a flexible left arm who could match up with lefties and eat innings out of the bullpen. “Beyond that,” Blake said, “it was unclear.”
Cortes dominated Class AAA, and injuries and coronavirus absences created a hole in New York’s staff. He had expanded his repertoire by adding a slider, which slowed hitters’ swings and stole him looking strikes. With the 11:30 grip, his fastball, once a liability, became a pitch that flummoxed hitters.
“In this day and age, velocity is important, but we’ve learned a lot more about just pitch characteristics,” Blake said. “You want to be an outlier in some regard.”
Cortes’fastball also benefited from attributes that aren’t measurable. He hides the ball in his delivery, deception accentuated by his short arms. He controls the game with pace and rhythm. When hitters miss his fastball, even though it’s slow, they tend to be late.
“The radar gun is just one measure,” Boone said. “Life on the fastball — how it plays, how it spins, all that — is the mark of a good fastball. There’s guys who throw 96, 97 who don’t throw their fastball because it stinks. His does not.”
Cortes has maintained the differing deliveries, too, usually based on a hitter’s swing or the game situation.
“I pick my spots,” he said. “I don’t do it every time, just so I don’t look like an idiot when I do give up a home run.”
Cortes has established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball, crucial to the World Series hopes of the sport’s most glamorous franchise. Sitting in the visitors’ dugout at Camden Yards, he laughed.
“At times we have a team dinner, and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting at the same table as Aaron Judge, (Giancarlo) Stanton, Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rizzo,’ ” Cortes said. “Those guys are like MVP candidates, won World Series, peak of their game. I grew up in Miami. I watched Stanton when he was on the Marlins. It’s so cool to share a clubhouse. Sometimes, I see myself sitting on the couch with Anthony Rizzo. I’m like: ‘Hey, what’s up, dude? I can’t believe I’m sitting right next to you.’ ”