Picture the visual manifestation of the verbal shoulder shrug, “Meh.” For seven minutes, the pitcher tries to fend off the beat writers’ questions, seemingly waging a personal battle to see whether he can offer fewer smiles or soundbites.

Gerrit Cole's recount of his Sept. 1 effort against the Angels barely extends beyond a robot’s cadence, which is a shame, because it was among the more remarkable performances of this entire weird season: seven innings of four-hit ball, 15 strikeouts, no walks. Cole threw 116 pitches, 30 of them (a career high) resulting in whiffs. When his final pitch culminated with a sword-like half-swing from Angels catcher Max Stassi, Yankees play-by-play man Michael Kay roared with his assessment of Cole’s part in halting a four-game skid.

“That’s an ace!” Kay bellowed, while an entirely different force of nature -- Hurricane Ida -- blasted his remote broadcast booth at Yankee Stadium, nearly 2,500 miles away from the action. “That’s a big boy performance!”

Baseball dominance isn’t a uniform entity. It can take the form of a no-hitter or of a shutout or of a five-hit night or a three-homer game. The Yankees enjoyed a no-hitter early in 2021, and Cole, himself, pitched a stunning 1-0 shutout in Houston this past July. (As for any three-homer games from Cole, don’t hold your breath.) But after striking out 14 Angels on swings and misses -- including Shohei Ohtani three times -- Cole was clinical in his analysis. “It was a good day for the fastball,” the pitcher said.

Or, if it’s easier, “Meh.”

It’s natural to assume that Cole is a reticent genius, a hyper-focused thoroughbred charging through a Major League career boxed in by blinders, but the thing with Cole is that he’s anything but. Indeed, the Yankees’ ace is an exceptional hybrid of personality and performance. Watch him on the mound for a series of starts, and it’s plain to see that he leans on his passion as much as his preparation.

Contrary to his demeanor in what might have been a valedictory post-gem press conference, Cole is quick to laugh, and it’s the best type of laugh. Goofy and disarming, the kind you don’t always expect, but crave more and more after you earn one. He is usually generous and friendly, but sometimes menacing, such as when he dispatched Aaron Boone from the Houston mound in a torrent of expletives and shouts, the manager fortunate to return to the dugout with all of his extremities. Cole is a man who long delayed the realization of his boyhood dream only to have literally every part of his family’s well-considered plan come to fruition.

He can probably tell you all of the ways that the dimensions and mound characteristics of Yankee Stadium best suit his game, yet he was also finally lured to the roster of his favorite team by a meaningful bottle of wine.

“He’s a nearly perfect combination of intelligence, competitiveness, constant drive to improve and stuff,” says Rob Friedman, Twitter’s resident Pitching Ninja. “He’s like a big bully on the mound, while also being incredibly strategic and calculating -- with the stuff to match it.”

When forced to choose between the emotional path or the analytic, Cole has managed to straddle the line, teetering on a knife’s edge of precarious balance, all the while looking in total control. And if you prod him enough, Cole might even tell you how he feels about it all.

***

Ohtani steps up to the Angel Stadium plate with one out in the first. He is carrying the league lead in homers, but that’s a barely suitable measure of his impression on the season’s first five months. As Cole stares out from the mound, his posture ramrod straight, dead center on the pitching rubber, it’s hard not to think of the Billie Jean King mantra he referenced a few times during his introductory presser at Yankee Stadium in December 2019: “Pressure is a privilege.”

For Cole, among the most skilled hurlers of his generation, that pressure doesn’t wane with each success; the moments grow with the demands, in ways both physical and emotional. “There’s a stress component to it,” he says from the Yankee Stadium dugout a few days after his Anaheim masterpiece. “You don’t want to tighten your muscles up or to be apprehensive with your movement. I think the challenge is to try to block that out and execute. I think people individually put pressure on themselves, and then there’s pressure that is out of your control.

“I’m always trying to find the balance of using that adrenaline without overshooting my shot. … You just don’t want to be grinding your teeth on the way home from the field, or on the way into the park. That can cause you to not be free when you move out there.”

Cole starts Ohtani with a knuckle-curve, and the Japanese slugger, who feasts on speed, spits on the strike down and away. Two straight balls follow, then Cole attacks with a pair of fastballs -- 99 and 98 -- that flirt with the absolute middle of the plate. Ohtani swings through both for Cole’s first K of the evening.

There’s moxie and menace in the feat. Forgetting for one second that Cole’s fastball is otherworldly, and that hitting any pitch is a nearly impossible task, it’s still the type of battle plan that is crafted to set up the long game. “There is nothing worse than getting a fastball thrown right by you in your first at-bat of the night,” says John Flaherty, looking back a few weeks after he provided analysis on the night’s YES Network broadcast. “Because you have that in your head for the rest of the way. He just challenged me and threw that ball right by me.

“I’m sure Ohtani all year long -- and rightfully so -- has been pitched very carefully. And there are pitchers that pitch around him. They don’t want to mess with him. And they’ll say, You know what, here’s a breaking ball or whatever, I’m going to walk you. Gerrit that night said, I’m coming right at you with my best stuff. And Ohtani got blown away. So as a hitter, you don’t forget that the rest of the night.”

On the mound, Cole barely responds. He knows that his fastball is special, that he can paint with it in triple digits. For all the analysis he uses to break down his attributes, he’s straight to the point with regard to his heater: “My biggest attribute from god is probably my fastball, and my ability to command it,” he says, noting that he still has to work to keep it sharp. But as he points out afterward, it’s not just about brute force. Every pitch is considered, each outcome a lesson.

“I use logic,” Cole says, then transitions to a lesson he learned from a former Pirates pitcher and broadcaster that he chatted with often during his early years in Pittsburgh. “Kent Tekulve used to tell me, ‘I know you’ve got 101 in there, pretty much every time you come out. Oftentimes, the best place to put 101 is in your back pocket. Everyone knows that it’s always right there.’

“That’s what I feel like people are saying, He’s just mad, he’s going to boom-boom-boom-boom. The fastball is what it is. I’m not trying to throw it super hard, and it’s coming out 96, 97. It’s located in a good spot. And the guy’s not on it? And I’ve got a little bit extra? Why complicate this any more? Let’s just keep it simple.”

Only, it’s not always that way. Flaherty compares Cole to both Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina. Clemens, Flaherty says, never needed to be self-aware on the mound, because he knew that his pitches were good enough. If he put the right attitude behind them, he would beat you. It wasn’t about adjusting or being cute. Just force.

Mussina, in contrast, learned from every pitch in every start, adjusting to everything he saw. Flaherty recalls the first time he tried to talk about a game plan with the future Hall of Famer, and the pitcher wouldn’t have it; how could they make a plan until they knew how his stuff was working that night? So Flaherty, whether on his couch or in the broadcast booth, will note the ways that Cole sometimes paces around the mound after a foul ball or a popup, and will see the pitcher’s anger in having missed his intended spot. It’s process over outcome, with the understanding that if the process is good enough, then the outcome will follow.

“I think that his emotional intelligence, combined with his actual intelligence, is a unique skill set because it gives him a chance to view the game through a different lens,” says Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake. “He’s invested in the psychological battle between pitcher and hitter.”

***

When Cole got to UCLA in 2008, Bruins head coach John Savage noticed the pitcher’s emotional approach right away. “It was a characteristic that you loved about him,” Savage says 13 years later. “But also, during the time of a game where you almost needed to be even-keeled, he’d get a little overzealous, a little overexcited, try to do too much, and get himself into trouble.” Cole would chase that extra 5 mph that he couldn’t control, or would try to spin a slider better than his arm allowed. Suddenly, his terrific start was merely very good.

As problems go, these are reasonably small. Most pitchers spend the years climbing the ladder to the Major Leagues maturing and learning how to harness their talents. Whether in college or the Minors, the end goal is development. So Cole thrived as the Friday night pitcher at UCLA, then earned the No. 1 Draft pick and a record signing bonus, which by itself would be quite the achievement, even before you get to the gamble at the heart of Cole’s college choice.

Before he enrolled at UCLA, Cole was the kid who, during the World Series seven years earlier, had been photographed holding a sign proclaiming his lifelong devotion to the Yankees. After a decorated high school run at Orange Lutheran -- where he played his home games just about two and a half miles from Angel Stadium -- Cole pledged his services to the Bruins, and his parents, Mark and Sharon, put word out to MLB teams that Gerrit intended on honoring that commitment. But then the Yankees tried to body check those plans by selecting Cole with the 28th pick in the first round, betting that their checkbook -- and the emotional nudge -- could change the pitcher’s mind. For Savage, it seemed like the nightmare scenario.

“People were like, Oh, you’re not going to hold on to Cole, there’s no way!” Savage says. “This guy holds up the Yankee sign, that whole deal. This guy’s not going to college!” If there was one team Savage had to fear, it should have been the Yankees. “And from the outsider,” Savage continues, “that’s 100% right. But there was an inside part of me going, This guy’s not going to sign! They know he needs this. They know he needs this box to check. And that’s not easy to do, right?”

Put yourself in the Coles’ shoes. You have the Yankees willing to write a massive check so as not to waste their first-round pick. On the other side, you have three years of college, a gamble that -- at the end of the day -- would offer at best a 1-in-30 chance of his landing with the team that Gerrit had professed himself to be a fan of “TODAY TOMORROW FOREVER.” Just imagine the confidence that it takes to turn that down, without any way to know that the chance to pitch in pinstripes would eventually come.

“Mark and Sharon knew what their son needed,” Savage says. “And it’s just a unique progression. A lot of times, it doesn’t go the way it’s gone, right? We’ve seen it a million times. And this thing, he nailed each step along the way.”

Still, there was a process, the long road map. Savage saw a ridiculous talent who had some rough edges in his body language and self-control on the mound. The arm? That would take care of itself. “We really worked more on his mental game in college than his physical game. I didn’t think he was ready to be dealt with a whole lot mechanically in college. I don’t think he was ready to handle that mentally.” Over time, Savage noticed Cole spending heaps of time with Ken Ravizza, a famed sports psychologist who worked with the Bruins during their run to the College World Series finals in 2010. And 11 years later, Savage watched Cole mess around with Ohtani’s head a second time in Anaheim.

“Two bullfighters in a ring, and they’re going at it,” Savage says. “It’s strength versus strength.”

With a runner on first and two out in the third, Cole offers a first-pitch fastball. Coming in at 99, Ohtani looks at the chin-high pitch for ball one. “It’s just so confrontational at times,” Savage marvels. “What’s your strength? OK, let me go attack that strength.” Ohtani swings mightily at a changeup, then offers at a fastball outside. On the ensuing 1-2 count, Ohtani is able to hold up on a knuckle-curve for ball two, but then the pitcher attacks with another fastball, a bit high and outside, and Ohtani swings fruitlessly. It’s Cole’s fifth strikeout in just three innings.

“It’s a mental game. I’m going to beat you at what you’ve been hammering the league with,” Savage says. “And then it’s like, Wow, OK, this is the game you’re playing. There’s no way you’re going to do this to me again. And then he goes about it, and he does it to him again. And it’s like, Well, there’s no way you’re going to be doing this again to me the third time! It’s like, where’s the trickery?”

***

It’s common for announcers or writers or teammates to celebrate the control of mind and body that Cole demonstrates on the mound, but the pitcher knows that it’s not always that simple.

“I’m on the edge,” Cole says, then repeats it for emphasis. “I have a high standard. So, I do battle that in terms of pitch execution and selection.”

Sometimes you can see that in the way Cole mutters to himself between pitches, or the way he needs to take a walk around the mound after missing his spot (regardless of whether the hitter took advantage of the mistake). Sometimes, though, the adrenaline max-out is much more visible -- and even a bit funny.

On July 10 in Houston, coming off a string of less-than-stellar starts and returning to Minute Maid Park as a visitor -- on a national FOX Saturday night broadcast, no less -- Cole dealt into the ninth inning, even as his pitch count soared to a level he had never reached in his career. With two outs and Jose Altuve on first, Boone trotted to the mound to chat with his pitcher, who had thrown 126 pitches. Cole’s face burned with an intense rage, his upper body trembling like an aggressively shaken bobblehead doll. “I don’t really remember what I told him, to be honest," Cole would say after the game

All that he did next was fire three fastballs -- 98, 99, 99 -- in toward Yordan Álvarez, who swung through the last one for the final out of the 1-0 shutout victory. Boone would call the outing “one of the great ones I’ve seen, certainly in a regular-season setting.” Astros manager Dusty Baker would go one step further, comparing Cole to a Hall of Famer plenty familiar to New York baseball fans. “That was like Tom Seaver,” Baker said. “At the end, he ditched the rest of his pitches and relied on his fastball, the high fastball.”

Part of what made the outing so sensational was that Cole had been sick in the days leading up to it, such that Boone wasn’t sure what he could even expect from his ace that night. But from another perspective, the Houston outing offered a significant foreshadowing of his Anaheim performance against the Angels 53 days later. Going home to pitch in Angel Stadium as a Yankee for the first time, driving to the ballpark in the first car he ever bought, the same one he drove there so many times before. After a shortened 2020 campaign that saw the Yankees play only against teams from the East divisions, if you had to highlight the two series that would be the most emotional for Cole in 2021, you certainly would have circled the trips to Houston and Anaheim. And rather than get weighed down by the moments, Cole delivered two of his best starts of the season.

“I felt Anaheim coming a little bit. Houston kind of surprised me,” the pitcher says. “I think I just got a big surge from being sick. But I’ve been throwing the ball well. And I knew what I wanted to do with Anaheim. It was kind of relaxing, I guess. We’d spent a ton of time with [my in-laws] in Oakland, too. It’s the same song and dance in Anaheim, except with my family.”

But then, as if responding to a misplaced slider that he got away with, Cole’s whole tone changes.

His tone isn’t hostile. It isn’t an attack, and it isn’t angry. Rather, it’s just a façade lifting. It’s an honest effort to drop all pretense, to acknowledge the emotion. You’re paying me to be an ace. This is what an ace does. In a sense, it’s like throwing fastballs past a guy who normally crushes fastballs. Let’s not beat around the bush here.

Because the alternative -- the tried-and-true cop-out of acting like all things are equal -- looks a lot like the start of the sixth inning in Anaheim. Jack Mayfield led off with a single on a 1-1 changeup, then Cole hung a 1-1 slider to David Fletcher that scored the Angels’ first run. Cole had 10 strikeouts, but the Yankees’ lead was just 3-1 with a runner on second, no one out, and the MLB home run leader coming to the plate representing the tying run. The Angels seemed to be rallying, and Flaherty, on the microphone and afterward, was incredulous that Cole was getting cute. “Go with the heater!” Flaherty says days later, thinking back to his emotion watching the Angels’ first signs of life.

Part of what makes Cole so exceptional is that he can maintain his velocity so deep into games. He can beat you with 100 in the final frames. So why go away from it? “It was so good!” Flaherty continues. “But you do get caught up in game plans. This is the book on this guy. And if I execute it … But there are times when you have to recognize, and I think it gets to the end of that game. He said, I’m just letting this thing fly because they have no chance on my fastball.”

In stepped Ohtani, as Jonathan Loáisiga started getting loose in the Yankees’ ’pen. Cole teased a bit with a low change, drew a swing on a 99 mph outside sinker, came way inside with a 100 mph heater, then induced a corkscrew flail on a changeup. With a 2-2 count, Cole went back to his bread and butter, firing 99 low and away. Ohtani was probably expecting it on the upper part of the zone, hoping for something inside; instead he swung haplessly for a third K.

“I think he’s aware of who Shohei Ohtani is, and what Shohei Ohtani does well,” Blake says. “And that plays in to how he attacks him. And I also think he takes into account the history of what he’s done with Shohei, so he knows what Shohei has swung at well, or what he has done. So, I think he’s factoring all that in, and it looks like he’s just bullying him with the fastball. But there’s a lot of underlying information that he’s using to get to that point.

“He’s definitely emotional, and it’s something that he battled early in his career, keeping his emotions under control as the game speed kind of picks up. I think we’ve seen that he can take his game to another level when the emotions rise. … It’s definitely a skill you have to continue to harness.”

***

Few pitchers can harness their emotions better than Cole. After that sixth inning (he followed up the Ohtani K with two more strikeouts), the hurler, who had thrown 101 pitches already and struck out 13, gave his manager a slight thumbs-up and nod, an indication that he wanted one more inning. Boone wasn’t going to argue. Yet for all the success of the starts in Houston and Anaheim, Cole can’t bring that verve into the next day’s newspapers. In the postgame Zoom Room, Cole really only lights up at the chance to talk about his teammates. Forget all that he did in the 1-0 and 4-1 victories, respectively. Cole has plenty of good things to say about Aaron Judge homers and Kyle Higashioka’s steadiness behind the dish. But he demurs when forced to assess his own performance after the biggest games.

Part of the brusque and stilted Anaheim presser, he admits later, is that he mostly wanted to go hang out with family. “What I say is not as important as what I just did,” he explains days later, considering the question of why he seems so reticent after his best starts. “So I’m just like, Let me get out of here.” But beyond that, the man who can toy with and bully the world’s best hitters from the pitcher’s mound just doesn’t know how to talk about it without coming off as obnoxious. For a pitcher who considers every angle, who has built a career off making hard choices and delaying gratification (and millions of dollars), there’s not much upside to talking with your mouth when your arm says it all. Indeed, it’s worth noting that Cole’s pressers after his run-of-the-mill starts -- think his excellent, but not otherworldly, effort in Baltimore after coming back from a hamstring scare in mid-September -- often find the pitcher perfectly willing to address the things that he did well, and what he was happy with. It’s just when he’s extraordinary that he clams up.

“Maybe that’s my way of trying to be humble,” Cole says, genuinely seeking to figure out why he’s so uncomfortable in those situations. “It’s never as good as you think it is; it’s never as bad as you think it is. Even though I’ve performed really well in a certain situation, I still needed somebody else’s help to win the game. So, it’s not all about me. Sometimes I’m fearful of coming off like that. It’s a combination of being mindful of that and still trying to be composed in there.”

Think about that. Think about how hard baseball is. Think about how much work an ace such as Cole puts into being exceptional. Think about the never-ending drive to put yourself in a position to get Shohei Ohtani to strike out swinging three times. That should be the hard part. Unless, perhaps, you can reach a point of such excellence -- leaning on the perfect combination of precise preparation and passion -- that it simply becomes impossible to describe what you did without coming off the wrong way. “I think that goes to professionalism, and knowing what comes around goes around,” Savage says. “I think he’s so prepared to talk. He’s so prepared to pitch. He’s so smart. … I just think that he’s so respectful of being a professional, and you don’t see that as much. You don’t see that respect. He respects history. He respects knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows everything. Even though he’s so bright, and he knows himself very well, he’s still learning.”

Cole still has years left in his New York career, and he and Ohtani figure to face off plenty in the years to come. Sometimes the slugger will win, because he’s incredible, and even the best pitchers make mistakes.

Whatever happens, though, positive or negative, it won’t be because Cole loses control of the moment, or because he gives in to his emotions. It will be -- as it has been since he was an 11-year-old kid holding up a sign in Phoenix -- because the man who so understands the privilege of pressure has leaned on the balance of head and heart, and to this point, that combination has hardly ever failed him.