2017 MLB Draft Guide Player Profile: Gerrit Cole

Gerrit Cole

26 years old

Bats/Throws: R/R

Height/Weight: 6’4”, 230 lbs

Position: Starting Pitcher

THE NUMBERS

Minor League Overall Rankings per season after being drafted 1^st overall in 2011.

Career Innings Pitched Marks (minors + majors)

THE SKILLS

An elite talent, Cole was taken at the top of his class, then blew through the minors reaching the majors, and having a ton of success. Alas, let’s talk about that last part first; the workload.

As you can tell, Cole doesn’t exactly have a track record of big innings. Look at those numbers. Cole has never thrown 162 innings in back-to-back seasons. You cannot be an ace if you can’t do that. In fact, you can’t be an ace unless you’re consistently thrown 190+ innings, a number Cole has reached just once.

In 2013 Cole was a rookie, and he pitched extreme well over a substantial swatch of innings.

In 2014, Cole missed 63 days with right lat tightness and shoulder fatigue.

Cole finished fourth in the NL Cy Young voting in 2015.

In 2016, Cole missed 66 games with right elbow inflammation and a right triceps strain. Before any of that stuff happened though, Cole injured himself in the offseason and because of rib inflammation he was late starting in Spring Training. He was basically hurt all season long, a cautionary tale, that should make everyone who is interested in drafting a pitcher this season who is dealing with some health woes in spring dubious as to the efficacy of such a decision.

The real question with Cole is how do we view his 2016 effort? Do we view it as a write off and not care at all? Should we be aware of the struggles but totally ignore them? Is there a midpoint where we admit concern based both on performance and the ill-fated attempt to consistently rack up innings? Let’s explore further.

For his career, Cole has a 3.23 ERA. The mark was up at 3.88 last season, a career-high.

For his career, Cole has a 1.20 WHIP. The mark was up at 1.44 last season, a career-high.

For his career, Cole has an 8.36 K/9 rate. The mark was down at 7.60 last season, a career-low.

For his career, Cole has a 2.30 BB/9 rate. The mark was up at 2.79 last season, a career-high.

For his career, Cole has a .316 BABIP. The mark was up to .345 last season, a career-high.

For his career, Cole has a 73.6 left on base rate. The mark was down to 71.1 last season, a career-low.

For his career Cole has a his line drive rate of 22.8. The mark was up to 25.4 last season, a career-high.

For his career, Cole has a ground ball rate of 48.0 percent. The mark was down to 45.6 last season, a career-low.

I told you it wasn’t pretty last season. There is a whole lot of league average in there with the 2016 results. If those numbers belonged to Mike Leake you would totally get it. Alas, this is Gerrit Cole we are talking about.

Injury is one obvious, huge issue to deal with when it comes to his massive fall down last season. He was hurt even before the season started and simply never found his footing. Some other numbers that speak to his struggles follow.

Cole posted the lowest ground ball rate of his career in 2016, something I noted above. It’s not that he was miles from his average, he was only 3.4 points off his 48.0 rate, and let’s also admit that his 45.6 percent ground ball rate isn’t exactly terrible. Cole still posted a 1.57 GB/FB ratio, the second worst mark he’s had in four years, but only slightly off his 1.64 rate. Again, 1.57 is a good mark and just two hundredths off his 2014-15 rate. As for all those grounders, it meant that he was once again homer adverse. For the 4^th straight seasons he failed to allow more than 0.72 homers per nine innings, and in fact his 0.54 HR/9 mark was two hundredths below his career rate. Same as always here.

Hmm...

Ah, how about we look at his splits.

Against righties, here are his 2016 numbers versus his career rates.

That’s a nearly identical match.

Hmm...

What about his work against lefties?

Eureka!

Holy crap was he awful against lefties last season as batters went from being league average into all being Jose Altuve. Let’s dig deeper.

Lefties had a 1.17 GB/FB rate last season. The career mark against them is 1.18.
Lefties had a 5.8 HR/FR rate last season. The career mark is 6.1.
Lefties had a 36.2 percent pull rate last season. The career mark is 35.2.
Lefties had a 3.06 K/BB ratio last season. The career mark is 3.21.
I’m not seeing anything either.

Hmm...

Here we go...

Lefties had a 28.5 percent line drive rate that led to that .419 BABIP.

For his career lefties are at 24.8 and .325.

Lefties have a 35.6 hard hit ball rate against Cole last season.

For his career the mark is 31.6 percent and had been 32.0 or lower the first three years.

Simply put, lefties mashed hard hit balls and line drives all over the field last season at an astounding, unsustainable rate.

Here are the results against lefties for his career from 2013-15 (from Brooks Baseball).

Here are the results against lefties for the 2016 season (from Brooks Baseball).

What we find is that Cole’s change up in 2016 was OBLITERATED. He only threw it five percent of the time, but when he did he might of well just hit the guy with the pitch since the batter was going to cause all sorts of damage with the pitch. He threw the change up 2.5 percent of the time in 2015. He should go back to that pace, or just scrap the pitch all together really.

Cole also had his trusty sinker smashed. Check out the Isolated Power mark. For the first three years his ISO on the sinker was .065. In 2016 the number was four times higher. Honestly, that’s really not possible, is it? Well, it is if you throw your sinker up in the zone, something that happened simply far too much last season.

Yes, the sinker didn’t sink last year.

As for the slider, a massive uptick there in batting average and SLG, though the Isolated Power mark remained largely unchanged.

AVERAGE DRAFT POSITION DATA

As of this writing, here are Cole ADP data.

Fantasy Alarm Player Rankings

CONCLUSION

The truth is this – we just don’t know who Cole will be in 2017. My guess is that he will be more of the 2014 version than the 2016 loser we saw last season. Same time, it would be bonkers to predict a full rebound from Cole after his rather dismal effort last season, despite a good deal of the measures suggesting he wasn’t as far off last season as it appeared to be. With health, he should improve. That much seems certain. I’m unable, at the moment though, to suggest that I expect that rebound to place him inside the top-20 starting pitchers in 2017.

10-Team Mixed: He’s best served as a fourth starter here. The talent/pedigree suggests invest. The recent performance suggests caution.

12-Team Mixed: The rebound potential makes him intriguing, but the above information should cause you pause. Realize that the plus/minus on Cole is about as big as any hurler inside the top-40 at the position, so bolster your staff if it includes Cole.

15-Team Mixed: I would be very cautious with taking him as a #2 in this format. That’s a bit too rich for my blood and leaves less room for profit than I would like.

NL-Only League: Someone will take him as an SP2 with ease, while others might want to make him their #1. You know which group I would suggest you fall in to. Even if the production returns, the questions about his durability should drop him into the SP2 ranks.

Ray Flowers can be heard Monday/Tuesday and Thursday/Friday, 8 PM EDT, Wednesday 7 PM EDT on SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio (Sirius 210, XM 87). You can also hear Ray Sunday nights at 9 PM EDT PM on the channel talking fantasy sports. Follow Ray’s work at Fantasy Alarm and on Twitter (@baseballguys).