Nestor Cortes opens up on making Yankees start in Miami hometown

MIAMI — The Hialeah Kid has become one of the players he grew up watching.

Now, Nestor Cortes will get to pitch in his home city for the first time as a professional, and the next generation of kids from Hialeah will be there to watch him.

Cortes is set to start Saturday’s game against the Marlins for the Yankees at loanDepot Park. It will be a long-awaited homecoming of sorts for the 28-year-old, who grew up a diehard Marlins fan about 30 minutes south of their old stomping grounds at Sun Life Stadium.

“It’s gonna be fun,” Cortes said this week. “Hopefully there’s a lot of ticket requests for when I pitch. Just going back to when [fellow Hialieah product] Gio Gonzalez was with the Nationals and he would go to Miami every year, as a high schooler growing up, watching your hometown hero pitch, hopefully I can have that impact.

“Hopefully somebody at Hialeah is looking up to me and has that same feeling I had.”

When the Yankees visited Miami in 2021, Cortes was in the rotation, but the timing was not right and he did not line up to pitch in the series.

This year, he was on the 60-day injured list with a rotator cuff strain until last Saturday. Because of all the variables involved, it was not until around then that he started to look at the schedule to see if the days lined up for him to be able to pitch in the series.

Cortes is expecting a surreal weekend.

“Oh yeah, 100 percent,” he said. “When I ran [in the outfield before games] in ’21, I was like, ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing here.’ And I was nervous. So I can’t imagine what I [will] feel like when I do pitch there.”

Cortes had about 20-30 ticket requests from family and friends for each game the Yankees played in Miami in 2021. Now that he is scheduled to actually pitch in this weekend’s series, he is expecting an overload of requests.

Long before Cortes defied the odds by going from the Yankees’ 36th-round pick in 2013 to an All-Star last season, he grew up in the Miami suburb of Hialeah. He moved there with his parents from Cuba when he was 7 months old, planting the seeds for his baseball journey.

“Hialeah’s got a tremendous baseball reputation,” Shane Fulton, Cortes’ coach at Hialeah High School, said last year. “We’re probably 98 percent Hispanic, a lower socioeconomic [city], hard-working families. But baseball is the passion down here.”

Cortes began playing baseball when he was 4 years old and followed the Marlins, who “meant everything to me,” he said. He was 8 years old in 2003 when the Marlins won the World Series.

“The reason I wanted to play baseball, the ’03 team [was] mixed in it,” Cortes said. “I knew that roster up and down off the top of my head, batting order. I was a full-on fan. I guess the best memory was that ’03 team when they won it all.”

Asked about his favorite player growing up, Cortes laughed.

“Everybody,” he said. “No, but it’s tough to actually pick one. The easiest answer is Miguel Cabrera. But there are so many guys that didn’t have a great major league career, but just put it all together that year and that’s what made it special. You had Alex Gonzalez, Luis Castillo, Juan Pierre. Pudge [Ivan Rodriguez]. Derek Lee had a good career. Obviously Miggy’s still playing. Mike Lowell had a good career, Jeff Conine had a good career — there’s so many guys.

“But the Luis Castillos, Juan Pierres, Juan Encarnacions, Alex Gonzalezes, those guys, I almost liked them more than the superstars.”

As for his favorite memory of going to a Marlins game, Cortes pointed to manager Jack McKeon’s final game in 2011. McKeon had been the Marlins’ manager when they won it all in 2003, and came back as interim manager midway through the 2011 season before retiring.

“That was pretty cool,” Cortes said.

Cortes remains a diehard Dolphins and Heat fan, and on any given day will enter the clubhouse wearing those teams’ apparel, especially on days when they are playing big games.

His Marlins fandom has been replaced by his day job, but Cortes and the Yankees still will have plenty of support this weekend.

“Everybody in South Florida, it’s either the Marlins or the Yankees,” Cortes said. “So I think that’s why this series is going to be incredible, because it’s two teams that are really loved down there. But growing up, it was just fun to cheer for the Marlins. I remember coming home from school — I believe they used to show Wednesday day games at noon and I would watch it on Fox. Just a lot of good memories overall.”

Nostalgia aside, Saturday is also an important start for Cortes as he tries to give the Yankees some much-needed support in their rotation as they fight an uphill battle to reclaim a playoff spot.

The left-hander looked sharp in his return on Saturday against the Astros, tossing four innings of one-run ball with eight strikeouts on 64 pitches. In the days following that start, Cortes experienced some “normal” soreness — described, at least for now, as different from when he was not bouncing back well physically between starts earlier this season, which led to his IL stint.

But it led the Yankees to give him an extra day before making his second start, pitching Saturday instead of Friday. That also ensures that he will receive an extra day before his third start against the Red Sox next weekend.

“We just kind of pushed him probably a little bit more than we wanted to in the first one and wanted to give him the extra days to bounce back,” pitching coach Matt Blake said. “Now line him up on seven days and six days as he’s still building his pitch count, which is the hardest part.”

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Want to catch a game? The Yankees schedule with links to buy tickets can be found here.

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Sevy’s shell shock

Luis Severino is typically one of the most confident personalities in the Yankees clubhouse.

That has made his sudden fall this season, which has taken a toll on some of that confidence, all the more stunning.

After his past few starts, Severino has been a mix of shell-shocked and dejected, at a loss when speaking to reporters and trying to explain what has gone wrong. He also tells it like it is, though, which has recently led him to call himself “the worst pitcher in the game” and then on Wednesday say, “I’m having the worst year of my life in baseball.”

There is work to be done in fixing Severino’s command and regaining the life on his pitches, but he may also need to rebuild some of that confidence.

“Sevy’s feeling it,” manager Aaron Boone said. “This is a guy that’s been a really good pitcher in this league and has also dealt with a lot of missed time from injuries. He’s very confident and a mature guy, but that said, when you go through something like this, it’s hard. He’s searching, too. We just gotta support him as much as we can.”

Good signs from Loaisiga

One of the only bright spots from the Yankees’ brutal series loss to the White Sox was the return of Jonathan Loaisiga.

The reliever, pitching for the first time in three months after undergoing surgery to remove a bone spur from his right elbow, hit 99 mph on the radar gun while needing just 12 pitches to throw a perfect ninth inning in Tuesday’s win.

“I think the helpful thing is he’s had the loose bodies in his elbow for a while,” Blake said. “So just getting those out goes a long way to making him feel better as he recovers. I think he’s got a fresh arm right now, and hopefully we can build on it.”