Tonight’s matchup between Shane Bieber and Gerrit Cole is a battle of pitchers on different points of the same trajectory.
On one side you have Gerrit Cole, a 30-year-old who has established himself as one of the game’s best pitchers since hitting the spotlight with the Astros two years ago. He buries his opponents in a mountain of fastballs with a gentle coating of sliders and curveballs.
Once he was traded into the Astros’ analytics-driven organization his strikeout rate jumped from 23.1% with the Pirates in 2017 to 34.5% in 2018 where it has remained ever since; his fastball spin rate went from one of the lower end of the spectrum to one of the best overnight and it just keeps climbing.