Gerrit Cole opts out of Yankees contract

When the Yankees signed Gerrit Cole in December 2019 to be their new ace on a massive nine-year, $324 million deal, they left a small door open for a potential departure a little over halfway through the contract. Cole had the ability to opt out after the 2024 campaign, effectively leaving a four-year, $144 million deal on the table.

This opt-out has indeed come to pass . The 2023 AL Cy Young Award winner could now potentially move on from the Yankees after five mostly-brilliant seasons, which saw him not only win that long-coveted accolade but also set a team strikeout record with 257 in '22, finish runner-up for '21 AL Cy honors, and make three All-Star teams. A hamstring injury late in '21 hurt him during his AL Wild Card Game start in Boston, but otherwise, Cole also looked sharp in playoff baseball, as well, notching a 2.60 ERA and 75 strikeouts across 11 outings in 2020 and 2022-24.

That stretch does, however, also include the now-infamous 2024 World Series Game 5, when he allowed five unearned runs in the fifth — partially due to Aaron Judge and Anthony Volpe's miscues, but also partially due to his own mental lapse in not covering first base on a grounder that could've ended the inning with the 5-0 lead intact.

Instead, a run scored, and Cole made mistakes on pitches to Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernández, which were both smoked for hits to tie the game at 5-5. First baseman Anthony Rizzo, whose own option for 2025 was declined today , also deserves some blame despite the weird spin on the ball, but Cole simply had to get over to first to render the point moot. Although the ace gets credit for somehow pushing through to keep the Yankees in it for the sixth and seventh, that fifth is an all-time clunker.

Will that outing actually be Cole's final game in pinstripes, though? Doubtful. The Yankees did include that opt-out in Cole's original deal, but they also gave themselves the ability to bring him right back without him testing the market. As noted by MLB.com's Mark Feinsand below, they can simply add another year to his deal at the same AAV.

Effectively, this all amounts to Cole deciding that the Yankees are probably comfortable giving him a new five-year, $180 million deal — or in the worst-case, that he can do better than a four-year, $144 million contract on the open market, even while entering his age-34 season. Given contracts in recent years to older pitchers Max Scherzer and Zack Wheeler, Cole beating that figure on the open market isn't outlandish. It's all at least a somewhat-similar situation to the one that the Yankees found themselves in with former ace CC Sabathia back in 2011 , when he had own opt-out.

The only complication that makes this not an instant pickup for the Yankees focuses around the right elbow that has helped make Cole's brilliant career possible. He had a serious scare back in spring training this year, when an elbow injury forced him to sidelines. Diagnosed with "nerve irritation and edema," Cole worked his way back by late June, essentially rehabbed at the MLB level, and then looked more like himself in the second half and postseason.

The Yankees will probably just bring Cole back. It's one of those decisions that probably doesn't make sense from a pure dollars-and-cents point of view because Cole likely won't be the same pitcher in his late thirties, but he means everything to this staff as a leader and secondary coach. He's also still easily their best starting pitcher and as Justin Verlander has demonstrated, Hall of Famer-caliber talents can sometimes just keep it going longer than you might expect, too. (Verlander only wilted this year at age 41.)

For those curious, the top starting pitchers on the free agent market would be Corbin Burnes, Blake Snell, Jack Flaherty, and Max Fried. It's not an overwhelming class, to be sure. Burnes is the best and he's had his own red flags across the past couple years as well (and is 30 in his own right). Snell's reputation is so up in the air that he had to settle for a make-good deal even after winning his 2023 NL Cy Young. So even if you were looking at this decision with cold, hard calculus, if you're the Yankees, it might just be safer to give Cole that extra year and not worry about this market of question marks.