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Breaking Down Gerrit Cole’s Recent Struggles After Today’s 5-4 Pirates Loss

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PITTSBURGH — Something is pretty clearly not right with Gerrit Cole.

For the third straight start, the Pirates’ top pitcher has looked extremely hittable and he pitched just five innings in the Pirates’ 5-4 loss to the Houston Astros Wednesday afternoon.

The issue seems to stem from catching too much of the plate, according to Cole and manager Clint Hurdle.

“Right now you could probably say he’s wild in the strike zone,” Hurdle said. “The overall command is coming and going. That’s just the way it’s been. … Some balls elevated in the middle of the plate, then you see some sequences that are sharp. We’re not getting the balls in the area we want to get them often enough or with consistency to minimize opportunities to score.”

“It was just every time I didn’t get to the spot, I just got burned,” Cole agreed. “When I was able to get it there, I had some good success. I got some broken bats and some weak fly balls. I’m just getting killed when I miss.”

The situation isn’t something that’s been happening all season — Cole’s best performance of the year came July 27 against Seattle. So I took a look at how his pitch usage and outcomes have changed in the last three weeks.

I started with usage. Cole said that he’s “been trying to look at approaches and maybe see how I can use my stuff better.” If that’s the case, the changes haven’t involved pitch selection, because his numbers have been fairly static all season. (Note: June had a small sample size due to his triceps injury, which will make its results a bit noisy.)

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Cole’s strikeouts have been pretty static, but I checked in on whiff rate just to see what was going on. It was pretty noisy and there doesn’t seem to be a fit.

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Moving back to Wednesday’s game, the most striking thing to me wasn’t the number of hits — after all, he had given up 12 in back-to-back starts coming in so seven wasn’t shocking. It was how hard-hit the hits were.

Evan Gattis’ two-run home run and Marwin Gonzalez’s triple to right were both well struck. Cole had given up 53 hits with a 100 MPH or higher exit velocity coming into the season, and 11 of them had come in his last two starts. 
So power, then.

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It’s pretty clear that Cole’s two-seam fastball has been getting hit hard lately. A typical bugaboo for right-handed sinkerballers is lefties, so I took a look at what left-handers like Gonzalez have been doing to Cole’s two-seamer.

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Yikes.

The good news for Cole is that for whatever reason, his four-seam fastball doesn’t seem to be subject to the same effects. If that is indeed the issue, it should be easy enough to throw his four-seamer more and his two-seamer less.

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