WASHINGTON — Yeah, he’s worth it.
Except that just might not matter this time.
With his final start of his most important season, Gerrit Cole shined once again, shutting down the falling-and-can’t-get-up Nationals by a 7-1 margin Sunday night in World Series Game 5 at Nationals Park and bringing his Astros to a 3-2 series lead. Unless Houston needs Cole’s bullpen services in a Game 7 Wednesday night at Minute Maid Park, Cole’s next meaningful pitch will come on Opening Day 2020, with him as the owner of a contract likely to land in the $250 million to $300 million range.
His last pitch of the night, possibly of 2019, got Victor Robles looking at a hotly contested called third strike — the fans here consequently chanted, “Ump, you suck!” — and gave him 47 strikeouts for the month, tying him with Cliff Lee (in 2010 with the Rangers) for the second-most strikeouts in a postseason, behind only the 56 that Curt Schilling compiled in 2001 with the Diamondbacks. Cole’s substandard Game 1, when he gave up five runs in his first loss since May 22, goes down as the aberration.
“I thought this stuff was crisper,” Cole said. “I thought we executed more pitches.”
It would be nice for the Yankees to execute this big signing. After all, their prior two monster commitments to arms — seven years and $161 million for CC Sabathia and seven years and $155 million (plus a $20 million posting fee to the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles) for Masahiro Tanaka — worked out spectacularly well, with Sabathia spending an additional four years with the club. In both instances, the Yankees prioritized their targets due to their ages, their upsides and their characters and determined, essentially, that they wouldn’t be outbid.
They’re not showing their hand as cleanly on Cole, the man they drafted out of high school yet couldn’t sign in 2008, and pursued yet couldn’t land when the Pirates shopped him in the 2017-18 offseason.
The Yankees hardly stand as an organization in crisis; to the contrary, they own a strong nucleus and advanced to Game 6 of the American League Championship Series before getting ousted by this ridiculously loaded Astros team. Their brand, however, is built on winning championships, and a sizable portion of their fan base is nauseatingly spoiled to the point of viewing joyrides like 2019 as a failure. And the Yankees have done a solid enough job of roster and payroll management — just one more year of the Jacoby Ellsbury Experience! — that they should be able to afford taking on a big-time risk.
You saw the reward attached to that risk on Sunday: With the battle of the aces going down the tubes when the Nats scratched Max Scherzer due to nerve damage in his neck, Cole permitted just one run and three hits over his seven innings, walking two and striking out nine. As Scherzer’s emergency replacement, Joe Ross, gave up a pair of runs in the second and two more in the fourth, the high-energy fans here found only two sources of release amid a lost weekend: the aforementioned hating on home-plate umpire Lance Barksdale and chanting, “Lock him up!” when a live feed of President Trump in a luxury suite appeared on the scoreboard in the fourth inning.
Imagine Cole, who grew up a Yankees fan in Southern California, fulfilling a childhood fantasy and heading a pinstriped rotation. Alas, the imagination can send Cole many places. The Angels are sending signals that they want in on the Cole business, and the Dodgers are well-positioned, if not necessarily philosophically inclined, to utilize a home-field advantage on Cole. If the Astros finish off the Nats, they’ll enjoy a cash infusion that could be used to try to retain Cole, who has truly enjoyed his time in Houston.
So even if the Yankees bid highest, they might not capture this prize.
They should give it a shot and prepare to pivot (Zack Wheeler? Hyun-Jin Ryu?) if they sense early that their competitors are too close in money and too desirable in locale. Not once, however, should they doubt the guiding principle:
Whoever gets Cole, he’ll be worth it.