A decade ago, in the days after he signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Gerrit Cole came up with a plan. His bonus was $8 million, a hefty reward for being drafted No. 1. He wished to thank the two people most responsible: His parents.

Mark and Sharon Cole were doting, caring and patient. They taught their son to embrace life, to be curious and thoughtful and enjoy the precious moments. Mark had taught his son how to throw a baseball under the cloudless skies of Orange County. Sharon taught him the importance of a classic Italian red sauce. They supported him emotionally (and financially) during three years at UCLA.

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So first, Cole decided to buy his mother a red BMW convertible. The gift was a surprise; it was also the obvious one. His mother had wanted a red convertible for years. His father, an executive in the medical field with a Ph.D. and an analytical streak, would never go for a depreciating asset.

The second gift needed to be something that would bring his family together, a present in which they could gather, talk and pop open a bottle of Bordeaux before dinner. Which is why Cole decided to build his father a 16-foot-by-16-foot wine room on the side of the family home.

It was, in the words of his father, “Classic Gerrit.”

One day in early March, a week before the country came to a halt due to the novel coronavirus, Gerrit Cole was in the Yankees spring training clubhouse in Tampa, sharing a story about the day he became fascinated by the complex nature of wine. He was a year or so into his career and home visiting his parents in Orange County. His father had invited four or five friends to taste a collection of aged Napas. It was a relaxing evening.

“We opened a handful of vintages from like 1995 to 2006,” Cole said.

They started with one vintage in particular and it was immediately disappointing.

“Flat,” Cole said. “It didn’t really have any punch.”

The gathering continued, and the conversation flowed. About 30 minutes later, they circled back to the first bottle.

“It was completely changed,” Cole said. “It was open. It was beautiful, and we made the mistake of not taking the opportunity to slam that guy and get on to the next one.”

Instead, they waited for dinner, and when they came back around in an hour or so, the first bottle of wine was flat again. It was no longer beautiful. It was gone.

“It was not a great year,” Cole said. “It was a short window of that oxidation, and I found that fascinating — that you could open something, it could completely change, and then it could completely change again. And so, that’s when we started diving in.”

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As Mark Cole puts it, “I think he realized that wine has a life of its own. It’s not forever.”

[Wine 101 with Gerrit Cole: Yankees pitcher explains where to start]

In baseball circles, Gerrit Cole is what you might call a wine guy, a connoisseur and explorer, a connector. His father has a Level 1 certification with the Court of Master Sommeliers. His family revels in sharing tips for dinner pairings. In recent years, Cole himself has studied how to age wines and discover flavors.

Inside the clubhouse, he has created his own unofficial network of tastemakers. His Napa Valley guy is Justin Verlander, his fellow ace from Houston. His Bordeaux guy is Justin Mourneau, an old teammate in Pittsburgh.

“My Burgundy guy is (Zack) Greinke,” he said. “I probably know the Italians better than those three.”

For Cole, wine is a pursuit that accompanies his love of food and cooking, a hobby he shares with his parents. It is also one reason he is standing here, inside the Yankees clubhouse, a few months before his first (delayed) season in New York. OK, it might not be the reason. His nine-year, $324 million contract — the largest for a pitcher in baseball history — played a significant role. Still, as the Yankees looked to sweeten their recruitment efforts in free agency, they opted for two bottles of Masseto — one from 2004 and another from 2005 — a Tuscan vintage considered one of the top red wines in the world.

The gift presentation came during a meeting at the Fashion Island Hotel in Newport Beach during the first week of December, as Cole weighed his options. The Yankees’ traveling party included general manager Brian Cashman, manager Aaron Boone and former Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte. Boone delivered the bottles of Masseto.

The wine was a thoughtful touch, but the present had deeper meaning. One of the bottles was the same vintage as one that Cole and his wife Amy had sipped on during an anniversary meal in Florence, Italy. For the rest of the day, Cole could not shake the detail.

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“When I came home,” he said, “I was telling Amy, ‘How the fuck did they pull that off?’”

The answer, now famous, came the next morning, when Cole remembered discussing the meal and wine with Yankees clubhouse manager Lou Cucuzza during a series in New York.

“Not many people in the world know that that’s my favorite wine,” he said.

Eight days later, Cole agreed to his record-breaking deal with the Yankees. Three months later, he was in Tampa, talking about the wine room and what it meant to his family.

The Yankees signed Cole, 29, to front their rotation and help deliver the franchise’s first championship since 2009, a drought exacerbated by October failures the last two years. At an introductory press conference at Yankee Stadium in mid-December, Hal Steinbrenner, the club’s managing general partner, set the expectation higher than one breakthrough.

“We need to win some world championships,”  he said, before adding a clarification: “Plural.”

It is not an audacious declaration. Cole is coming off a season in which he finished 20-5 with a career-best 2.50 ERA and 326 strikeouts. His evolution across two seasons in Houston has put him in the realm of all-time greats.

“If he keeps this up,” former Astros teammate Dallas Keuchel said, “it’s Hall of Fame territory.”

Still, it’s not just his 97 mph fastball (second highest among starters behind Noah Syndergaard) or his postseason success (1.72 ERA in 36 2/3 innings last October) that caused the Yankees to guarantee $324 million. It is an analytical mind that can break down pitching mechanics in granular detail, understand the oxidation patterns of red wine, or map out a construction project for his father.

“He gets a lot out of life,” said Charlie Morton, his former teammate in Pittsburgh and Houston.

The wine room, for instance, was an interesting process. It took more than a year to complete — a step-by-step plan that included design, drawings, extending the foundation and construction. Today it holds hundreds of bottles of wine from all over the world.

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“When I walk in and close the door,” Mark Cole said, “it’s the feeling that I have.”

The wines are nice, of course. It’s the whole story he loves.

When Cole was a boy, his family would spend two weeks every August in La Jolla, the picturesque, seaside community in San Diego. Cole and his sister Erin would invite friends. The family would stay on the water. The annual vacation revolved around an evening ritual: Dinner on the beach.

“For 14 nights, we’d have a Weber (Grill) on the beach sand,” Mark Cole said. “Watching a sunset, just cooking.”

The kids would gather kelp to wrap and steam lobster; Mark would cook hamburgers and steak. Cole would sink his toes in the sand and smell the aroma wafting from the grill, helping his father monitor the meat.

“That was just part of his growing up,” Mark said.

Inside the Cole home, food was a bonding agent. The Coles prioritized evenings in the kitchen and eating together at their home in North Tustin, a community in the heart of Orange County. During the week, Sharon, who grew up in an Italian household, would pull a meal from the Best Recipes cookbook and call her children in to help. Mark would wait for Sunday, planning an adventurous (and increasingly detailed) dinner that would test his son’s palate.

“My mom was big on everybody sitting down for dinner all the time,” Cole said. “It’s just always been a big part of my life.”

Mark Cole had grown up in Michigan, moved to Syracuse, N.Y., in high school and eventually landed in Southern California for graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in pathology from USC. He set out into a career in the startup world, focusing on medical devices. When his son was young, he was on the road close to 70 to 80 percent of the time. The schedule led to a weekly routine: Mark would fly home on Friday night, spend Saturday paying bills and doing yard work, and then spend most of Sunday in the kitchen, preparing a feast of steak or prime rib.

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“Gearing up for Christmas, I might try a goose,” he said. “I would not hold back.”

His forays into the culinary arts spurred his interest in wine, and his knowledge for pairings, grapes and regional differences expanded. He remembers reading a book by celebrated chef David Rosengarten, who included a chapter on wines. But mostly, the extravagant meals just offered an excuse to spend time with his children.

“It was just kind of the way I’ve always felt it should be,” he said.

It didn’t hurt that Gerrit was a growing boy with an iron stomach and varied tastes for someone his age. He would feast on the green snails at the sushi bar without hesitation or crush his mom’s lasagna on Christmas Day. As his son grew, Mark said, he focused on fostering their other shared passion: Baseball.

“He taught me how to throw,” Cole said.

The Coles famously traveled to Arizona in 2001 to watch the Yankees in the World Series, where an 11-year-old Gerrit held a sign declaring his Yankees fandom for life. (Cole brought the sign to his first press conference in New York, and Mark laughed that a few fans questioned its authenticity.

“If you’ve ever gone through elementary school, the cardboard fades!” he joked.

It wasn’t just World Series trips, though. In the sixth grade, Cole wrote a school paper on Lou Gehrig. Around the same time, he started taking pitching lessons from Zak Doan, a local instructor who spent time in the Marlins system. With his background in research, Mark studied pitching and the arm like he researched pathology or a sommelier course. He offered his son books to read, including one by noted sports psychologist Ken Ravizza. He charted his workouts in high school, tracking the pitches and how his son felt afterward. He sought to avoid burnout or long-term damage to the growth plates.

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“That was an analytical process,” Mark said.

As Cole worked with Doan, the goal was never to dominate as a teenager. If a tournament didn’t fit into their throwing program, they skipped it.

“It was always about the big picture,” Doan said.

Born in September, Cole was always young for his grade, which factored into the long-term plan. He didn’t look at his own arm with the intellectual rigor of his father. Not at first, at least. But even then, as a teenager, he possessed a preternatural ability to understand the art of pitching, to feel how his body worked. He posed questions to Doan. He processed information. He could not stop thinking about pitching.

“He was certainly that way when he was trying to learn,” Mark said.

Cole grew into one of the best high school pitchers in the country, a star at Orange Lutheran, so talented that he stood out even on the elite showcase circuit, performing alongside future Yankees teammate Aaron Hicks and future big leaguer Anthony Gose.

“Aaron Hicks was on the mound throwing 100, but Gerrit Cole was just a little more refined,” said White Sox catcher James McCann, who caught Cole on a high school showcase team. “We were only 17 years old, but he was almost like a man playing with boys.”

The Yankees selected Cole with the 28th pick of the 2008 draft, but the Coles stuck with their analytical approach. To determine a worthwhile signing bonus, Mark attempted to quantify the value of a UCLA education and the experience and growth that would come with three years on campus. He also studied the careers and career earnings of pitchers drafted in the first round. They considered Cole would not turn 18 until the first semester of his freshman year. They knew the importance of school.

“(He was) maybe a little immature,” said Brandon Crawford, the Giants shortstop and older brother of Cole’s wife Amy. “Which I think he would probably tell you the same thing, coming out of high school. I hope he would anyway, otherwise that wouldn’t sound very good.”

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In the end, there was no dollar figure that would equal the UCLA experience. Cole would spend the next three years growing into the No. 1 overall pick. He pitched in the College World Series. He started dating his future wife. There was also one other fringe benefit: Mark Cole bought his son a grill and he started to cook.

One day this spring, Cole invited James Paxton and Jordan Montgomery, two members of the Yankees pitching staff, over for dinner. He cooked a meal of steak, baked potatoes, yellow peppers and asparagus. He brought out two bottles of wine and offered a tutorial on where they were from and the notes they would taste. One would be earthy, Montgomery remembered Cole saying. The other would have hints of fruit.

“You don’t spend the time understanding something as much as he does unless you’re passionate,” Paxton said.

The meal was one of the first Cole had prepared for teammates since joining the Yankees. The tradition dates back years, to before he debuted with the Pirates in 2013. One spring, Cole invited Morton over and prepared a meal of pan seared sea bass with tomato relish. Except he was staying at a rental home and he wasn’t comfortable with the stove.

“He burned the garlic,” Morton said. “He was livid at himself.”

Another time, Cole hosted teammate Tony Watson and Mark Cole joined, popping open a bottle of red.

“You bond over a bottle of wine and some dinner,” Watson said. “They know what they’re doing with it, so you’re just kind of along for the ride.”

Cole views cooking as an analytical process, a moment away from the day-to-day grind and an excuse to socialize.

“It’s his outlet,” Morton said.

He collects ingredients. He concocts a game plan. He focuses on the preparation and execution.

“It’s step by step,” he said. “It helps me clear my mind. It’s kind of an escape, and it’s a good way to bring people to the table.”

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In cooking, Cole prepares with simplicity. He relies on the recipes of Ina Garten, the host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa. He has taken recipes from David Rosengarten and Bobby Flay. He still borrows his mother’s recipes for eggplant parmesan or pasta e fagioli. At one point, he pulled heavily from The Best Recipe, an old collection of editors picks from Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

“It’s like the Bible of cooking, I feel like,” Cole said. “Outside of Julia Child’s.”

As Cole began to experiment with recipes and wine pairings, he realized that the art of cooking mirrored his favorite parts of baseball. The process and execution; the hours in the clubhouse, sitting with his friends and talking about life.

“I have a process of how I go about pitching, how I lead up to ultimately performing,” he said. “I think there are some parallels for how I do that.”

The parallels began back at UCLA, when he moved out of the dorms during his sophomore year. It was around time that he started dating Amy Crawford, a member of the Bruins softball program. He had a collection of hungry friends, a new grill and a kitchen. So, on free nights, he would drive to Trader Joe’s, buy a whole chicken for $12, pick up some fresh carrots, bell peppers and parsnips and use the jus to make a sauce.

“You’re done,” he said. “You got dinner for four people.”

From there, he leaned hard into salmon, learning how to make pesto and a beurre blanche sauce.

“Salmon with a little salt and pepper, get a good sear, throw it in the oven, cook it medium rare,” Cole said. “Everybody is happy.”

As Cole cooked for his friends, the hobby became a gateway into wine. He built the wine room for his parents. His father took a sommelier course at California-Irvine during his first years in the majors and compiled a two-page “Wine 101” document for a friend. He then shared it with son, who passed it along to friends and teammates. In time, Cole came to understand tannins, the polyphenols found in grape skins, stems and seed that give wine its astringency. He can teach teammates about mouthfeel and regions. As a rookie, he and veteran catcher Russell Martin discussed “big boy” wines, the bold flavors that come from the Bordeaux region in France.

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“He likes that stuff,” Morton said.

“He’s a worldly man,” Brandon Crawford added. “It’s the same thing with cars. He doesn’t have a ton of cars, but when he does have one, it’s a nice car.”

One day in 2018, during his first season in Houston, Cole walked into Morton’s hotel room on the road. Cole was in the middle of a breathing exercise. Morton, a former teammate from Pittsburgh, could tell that something was different.

“He was just changing,” Morton said. “It was an overall wellness adjustment.”

The Pirates had traded Cole to Houston the previous offseason. He had gone 30-13 with a 3.02 ERA in 2014-15, finishing fourth in National League Cy Young voting in 2015. But he’d taken a step back the previous two seasons; his ERA swelled to 4.26 in 2017. The Astros believed there was untapped upside.

The story of what transpired next is well documented. The Astros extolled the virtues of the four-seam fastball, compelling Cole to ditch his two-seamer. They preached the value of spin. The changes turned Cole into a monster, a 28-year-old who recorded more strikeouts per inning than any full-time starter in major-league history.

“This dude has got talent out the wazoo,” Morton said. “But it was just a couple things.”

The narrative of Cole’s evolution is, in the broadest strokes, accurate. Yet if there is something that is missed, former teammates said, it’s how aggressively Cole bought in, how his analytical mind made him the ideal student.

“He was asking so many questions in the spring of 2018,” Keuchel said, “that it was like: ‘Dude, Gerrit, shut up.’”

Cole leaned into the data provided by the Astros. He considered what worked and ditched what didn’t. He is, in the words of Morton, a near savant when it comes to feeling his body and understanding biomechanics.

“He’ll talk about things like: ‘I felt my big toe pronate or supinate,’” Morton said. “I don’t know how you can feel that in your delivery.”

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Cole can verbalize the nuances of pitching, a skill that caught the eye of Boone during their first meeting last December. He is, teammates say, a baseball nerd, someone who enjoys watching games and studying other players. According to Watson, who pitched with Cole in Pittsburgh, it’s not uncommon to get a random text during the season with a highlight clip from another game. “

He’s always trying to learn,” Watson said. “Understanding the ‘why.’”

To consider the full portfolio of skills — the physical talent, the inquisitive nature, the analytical mind, the creativity on the mound — is to see why the Yankees were comfortable doling out the largest contract in franchise history — an outlay that, pre-pandemic, was set to be worth nearly a third of a billion dollars over the next nine seasons.

“The thing that gave us the most comfort with him over the nine years is that it’s a full arsenal,” Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said.

It’s why Boone carried two bottles of Masseto into a meeting last December. Every detail was important.

“I was a little bit back on my heels,” Cole said. “I remember trying to stay focused on the meeting and not thinking about booze the entire time.”

For now, the latest details in the story are on hold. As the pandemic ravaged New York City and a bitter labor battle imperiled the 2020 season, Cole and his wife quarantined at their new home in Connecticut, playing catch in the backyard, breaking in the kitchen and unveiling a significant donation to Direct Relief, a nonprofit helping coordinate efforts to battle COVID-19.

Back in March, Morton told me that he expected Cole to love New York. He believed he would thrive in the city atmosphere. He would enjoy exploring and learning and become a New Yorker.

“I think he’s going to like the vibes and how diverse it is,” Morton said.

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When baseball returns, Cole will set forth in a very different New York. Yet he appears prepared to help the city rebuild and move forward. The plan will be different, the challenges unexpected, but for Cole, the process remains the same. Prepare and execute. Seek out information and learn. Cook for his teammates and take the mound every fifth day.

“He’s started to see the similarities in the process,” Mark Cole said. “But there’s always that changeup, and yes the pun is intended.

“Where instead of these two ingredients, ‘I’m going to swap these two in and see what I get. Now you’re really off and being creative.’ And I think he has to do that in his world now.”

(Top photo: Kim Klement / USA Today)

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