BALTIMORE — The story that epitomizes Nestor Cortes’ 2022 All-Star season took place months before the season began.
In November, before the MLB lockout started (and players were no longer allowed to communicate with team staff members), Cortes reached out to Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake and asked if he thought he would be on the roster to start the 2022 season.
Cortes had a breakout season in 2021, pitching 93 innings with a 2.90 ERA. He made 22 appearances for New York last year, including 14 starts. Yet, he needed to make a decision about whether or not to play winter ball. So, he gave Blake a call.
“I asked him, ‘Hey, what do you think? Am I on the inside looking out, or the outside looking in?’” Cortes recalled Saturday afternoon in Baltimore. “I wanted to know where I stood in the organization. I mean, I’ve been DFA’d before. I’ve been up and down. So I was trying to see where I stood.”Blake shared this story with reporters in early May, after Cortes had made six starts and sported a 1.41 ERA. Blake laughed as he shared the anecdote, understanding that everyone in the room likely understood that Cortes would have been entering spring training with a rotation spot to lose.
He couldn’t tell Cortes explicitly that he would be in the rotation on Opening Day, but he told him, “I think you’ve got a shot at making the team,” which was enough for Cortes to sit out on winter ball for the first time since 2016.Security and stability are not concepts that have made themselves present throughout Cortes’ nine-year professional career. His breakout campaign, which began late last May and has carried him all the way to the All-Star Game, has created a strange form of dissonance for the 27-year-old left-hander.
He was a 36th-round pick who has built himself a career in professional baseball through being reliable, durable, and throwing strikes consistently. But he’s been designated for assignment, traded, removed from a roster, and was optioned to the minor leagues seven times in one season.
Now a star, Cortes is experiencing the strangeness of success that comes when you’re used to scrapping.
“For Matt to sort of hint that I was going to be in the starting rotation was kind of surreal for me,” Cortes said. “It’s hard to know where I stand. My whole career, it’s been like, ‘Oh, he’s a fifth starter — if that.’ So to think about being chosen to be part of the Yankees’ starting rotation was incredible.”
Months later, when manager Aaron Boone got word that Cortes had spent his offseason unsure of whether or not he would make the opening-day roster, he visited the left-hander’s locker and told him that not only would he be on the team, he expected him to be an All-Star.“I didn’t really believe that on the inside,” Cortes admits. “I just thought he’s doing his job as a manager, saying that to give me confidence.”
Cortes says his All-Star selection didn’t begin to really hit him until he was shagging fly balls in the outfield at Dodger Stadium before the Home Run Derby, envisioning the chance to pitch an inning for the American League team in the All-Star Game the next night.
“I was like, ‘Man, I hope I get picked to pitch an inning tomorrow,’” Cortes said. “Then they told me I was going to pitch the sixth inning. That’s when I was like, ‘Oh sh—, I’ve got the sixth.’”
Cortes’ humility isn’t a put-upon act by a ballplayer who always felt destined for the top of the mountain. It’s not an ‘aw-shucks’ sort of shy humility, either. It’s the genuine, informed perspective of a man who has spent his career being treated as ‘good enough’ but never ‘better than the rest.’
“I think the fear of failure is what keeps me motivated,” Cortes said. “If I pitch tomorrow and I give up seven runs, I expect I might be optioned, no matter what I’ve done this season, no matter if I was in the All-Star Game. That’s what keeps me afloat: The fear of going back to what I was is what pushes me, it drives me.”
Cortes was naïve about what his life might look like when he was drafted by the Yankees out of Hialeah (Fla.) High School in 2013. Not only were more than a thousand players drafted before him between the 30 clubs that year, the Yankees picked 37 other players before selecting Cortes, who was 5-foot-10 and threw 87 miles per hour.
“I felt like a million bucks,” Cortes says. “Even though I got $85 grand.”
He didn’t know that he’d be competing against hundreds of other players to ascend to the major leagues, and that it would take more than two years to get there (it took five). He didn’t understand that getting into pro ball was the easy part, ascending through the ranks as a non-prospect without the obvious “projectable” physique and flame-throwing repertoire would be a battle.Cortes has some intangibles working for him, however. He’s extremely personable and likable, remarkably adaptable, and willing to take on a tough assignment and go out there and throw strikes. Often, he was tapped to make spot starts in higher levels because the coaches felt he could at least give them a few solid innings before sending him back down to Low A, or High A, or Double A.
The Orioles selected Cortes in the Rule 5 draft in late 2017, and he made his major-league debut in 2018. Baltimore would go on to lose 116 games, but they entered that season intending to contend. Cortes, who had a 7.71 ERA in four starts, was not part of the plan.
He was designated for assignment that April and returned to the Yankees (players selected in the Rule 5 draft have to remain on a major-league roster all season or be offered back to their original club). Cortes has never planned for a life outside of baseball. He’s played the game since he was four years old and intends to play until he is 40, even if the final 10 years of his career are in the minor leagues. But the DFA by the Orioles — which he now sees as the best thing that could have happened to his career — did shake his confidence at age 23.
Back in Triple A with the Yankees, he gave himself a reality check.
“I’m like, ‘Man. There’s people out there that have it worse than me and are super happy,’” Cortes recalled. “I’m out here living a dream and I don’t want to be here anymore. There are people out there working terrible shifts from 10 pm to 7 am, unable to see their families or sleep on a normal schedule. And I’m here complaining about playing baseball.”
The idea of quitting the game never occurred to Cortes, who says he saw too many talented players in the minor leagues quit, or threaten to quit, when they didn’t get what they felt they deserved. He was there to play baseball, wherever that took him. Throughout it all, he maintained major-league aspirations. But as a recently-designated 23-year-old eating up innings in the minor leagues, he certainly could not have imagined this.
Over the last offseason, Cortes decided to get a new tattoo. His left arm is his money arm, his right arm is the one he has marked. On his forearm, he has a large Cuban flag and a depiction of a highway shield with ‘305’ and ‘Hialeah’ on it, the former being the area code for his vastly Cuban-American hometown. On the top of his right wrist, he wanted to get his new nickname — ‘Nasty Nestor’ — but he felt a little bit of hesitation.
“I imagined some people would be like, ‘Look at this guy. Nasty Nestor, blah blah blah,’” Cortes recalled. “But the truth is, every Yankees fan calls me that. And 20 years down the road, I can know that I was once ‘Nasty Nestor,’ even if I am never again ‘Nasty Nestor.’ In 2021, this is how Yankees fans referred to me. So I got the tattoo.”
Success has called Cortes’ name, but he knows it might be fleeting. There are new expectations of him now, though. He’s not just the spot-start hero asked to eat five innings one day to save the shoulders of pitchers higher than him on the depth chart.
After more than eight years of working to obtain regular major-league success, Cortes’ responsibility is now to sustain it. It’s a different assignment for the left-hander, who has pitched his way to a perch on which there are now higher expectations of him than there were before his breakout campaign in 2021.
“It does feel strange when our bullpen guys are like, ‘Hey, we need you to go seven today,’” Cortes said, laughing. “On the inside, I’m like, ‘Come on, it’s so hard to go five, and you want me to give you seven or eight?’ But it shows the confidence they have in me and the results of my work.”
Cortes has already set a career-high in major-league innings pitched, throwing 95 2/3 innings over 17 starts thus far for a 2.63 ERA. He has grown more confident in his major-league identity, which has led to more consistent results, but he recognizes the things he can’t control.
On May 30, 2021, he was called up to the Yankees again with the assignment of being the “bulk guy” in a game against the Detroit Tigers. He pitched 3 2/3 innings, allowing one earned run, and spent the rest of the season on the major-league roster. The alternate history feels present to Cortes even though he never lived it.
“If I get optioned after that because the Yankees needed a fresh arm for the next day, I probably wouldn’t be Nasty Nestor today,” Cortes says. “I would have had to be in the minor leagues for 10 days after that, then I would probably go another month without being called back up and sent back down again.”
Instead, Cortes made some relief appearances in June, then was in the rotation full-time by the end of July. He kept his aspirations modest: He just wanted to be on the roster when the Yankees traveled to his hometown of Miami on July 30. His wish came true, and he made 11 starts across August and September.Still, when it came time to decide whether or not to showcase himself in winter ball, he needed to ask his pitching coach if he had a chance to make the 2022 roster.
“I think it gets me in trouble sometimes, but I’m super realistic about opportunities and situations,” Cortes said. “I knew this offseason we might sign somebody, or things might change with Luis Severino coming back. Or maybe somebody performs better than me in spring training and I need to fight my way back into the rotation again, or onto the team.”
Blake turned out to be correct — Cortes did indeed have “a shot” at making the team. Boone turned out to be correct, too: Cortes wound up an All-Star. These anecdotes have become part of the Legend of Nestor, the guy who doesn’t expect anything but keeps earning his opportunities.
As Cortes continues to take the ball for the Yankees every fifth day, the feeling of stability is starting to settle on his mind.
“I think I feel more secure with my standing,” Cortes said. “There’s gonna be bumps in the road. Maybe I give up seven runs in one inning. That’s just part of the game. Honestly, I might be in the minor leagues in three, four years, or next year, whatever. But I won’t forget what I’ve been asked to do this year, and that has to give me some belief and some security in feeling like I won’t be the old version of myself again.”On the outside, friends, fans, and observers see a man who has made it to the top — the New York Yankees’ starting rotation — and is the portrait of determination, persistence, and success. On the inside, Cortes is adjusting to his newfound status. The Yankees simply consider him a stable member of their rotation. He is a fan favorite who has a nickname — Nasty Nestor — that was printed on shirts for a stadium giveaway item and Cortes now has tattooed on his wrist.
Cortes ascended from being drafted 1,094th overall to a star player on a team with serious championship aspirations. He is still acclimating, and taking a look at the scenery as he stands at the top. After all, a person can’t climb a mountain that steep without feeling a little bit out of breath.
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