There is a weird level of acceptance that comes from understanding on September 1st that your favorite baseball team is good enough to win 100 games and also that they will probably end up in a one-game playoff against a dominating starting pitcher. If the Pirates can’t catch the Cardinals (which they can, but is more or less out of their hands at this point, especially with the deficit at six games after last night), then the only thing that really matters for the Pirates in the next 30+ days is that Gerrit Cole gets himself back on track and to the level that he was at in the season’s first half.
I wrote a bit about Cole’s performance dip a couple of weeks ago, and now that he’s made a few starts since then, I think we can discard the “tipping” hypothesis and just focus on the slider (he doesn’t seem to be tired: he averaged 96 and hit 98 with his fastball last night). Brooks hasn’t updated Cole’s page with his last two starts, but it’s easy to see how his slider has lost its bite over the course of the season. Even in his last two starts against the Giants and Marlins, where he pitched well, the slider wasn’t quite biting the way that it was before the All-Star Break. Last night, Cole’s slider had more vertical break on it than it has in any second half start (-0.69 inches), but his fastball didn’t generate any whiffs and he gave up a bunch of hits as a result (it’s notable, I think, that his fastball was classified solely as a four-seamer last night, when usually he throws a good amount of pitches that are two-seamers).
I don’t have any good answers to these questions at the moment. My current MO is to repeat to myself over and over again that if Ray Searage can turn JA Happ around and into a competent pitcher, that he can certainly work with Gerrit Cole to get his slider biting the way that it did in the first half. Last night was actually a good step in that direction, so it’s possible that Cole working on his slider had a butterfly effect that disturbed his fastball a bit, and that even though the start last night was ugly it was a step in the right direction. We can’t say that for now, though, so all we can do is sit here and worry about whether or not he’ll get back on track. It’s unfair, but the Wild Card Game makes some players more important than others, and Cole will be the most important Pirate, should the Pirates find themselves in that game again.
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