ST. PETERSBURG -- There was no late-inning comeback in store for the Rays on Friday night.
Shut down by Yankees ace Gerrit Cole and done in by a rough relief outing from Trevor Kelley, the Rays saw their four-game winning streak come to an abrupt end in a 6-2 loss before a crowd of 22,679 at Tropicana Field. Meanwhile, Baltimore pulled off a late comeback against Colorado in a 5-4 win, pulling three games ahead of Tampa Bay in the American League East race.
Starter Zach Eflin did his part for Tampa Bay, striking out a season-high 11 batters with some of his best swing-and-miss stuff all year, but he ran into the wrong opponent in Cole. The Yankees’ right-hander was on top of his game in the series opener, as he struck out a season-high-tying 11 batters and permitted just two runs (one earned) on three hits over 7 2/3 innings.
“That's what he does. He's got great stuff. Elite command when he's on like he was tonight,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “We saw two of the best pitchers in the American League going today, and they kind of went toe to toe.”
The Rays had every reason to feel good about themselves and their resurgent lineup heading into Friday’s game after pulling off three straight come-from-behind wins in a three-game sweep of the Rockies. But that momentum only carried them so far against Cole, the AL Cy Young Award front-runner with an 11-4 record, a 2.95 ERA and 181 strikeouts in 168 innings this season.
The Rays managed only a pair of singles in the first two innings, and neither runner reached second base. Cole retired 18 of 19 batters after Isaac Paredes’ second-inning single, a dominant streak interrupted only by a sixth-inning solo shot off the bat of Yandy Díaz.
After scoring 41 runs during their winning streak, the Rays mustered nothing but Díaz’s homer and one eighth-inning run Friday, as Brandon Lowe smacked an RBI single to left off reliever Jonathan Loáisiga after Cole exited with two outs.
Díaz hit a hanging slider out to left-center field for his 17th home run, continuing his spectacular offensive season. But he said he felt “lucky” considering how locked in Cole was the rest of the night as the Yankees won for the third time in his four starts against the Rays this season.
“He was mixing his pitches really well,” Díaz said through interpreter Manny Navarro. “It's probably the best slider that I've ever seen him have.”
Eflin (13-8, 3.55 ERA) was nearly as stingy, however, and kept the game within reach for six innings. He had the Yankees off-balance with a mix of sinkers, curveballs, cutters and sweepers. He tied his season high with 17 swinging strikes; seven of those came on the nine swings the Yankees took against the sweeper he has developed this season, and that big-breaking pitch finished three of Aaron Judge’s four strikeouts.
“It was sweeping, so I kept throwing it, honestly,” Eflin said. “It felt good in my hand today and got some early kind of funky swings, so we kind of just decided to keep going with it.”
Eflin limited New York’s lineup to four hits over four scoreless innings before he surrendered a solo homer to DJ LeMahieu on a 2-1 curveball with two outs in the fifth. He allowed another run in the sixth, which began with a single by Gleyber Torres and a walk by Giancarlo Stanton. Everson Pereira cashed in on the early baserunners with a two-out RBI single to right to put the Yankees ahead, 2-0.
Still, Eflin left with the Rays down just one after throwing a season-high 103 pitches (70 strikes). The margin felt greater with Cole on the mound, though, and the scoreboard soon matched that feeling.
Cash noted that Tampa Bay’s relief corps was “taxed a little bit” after the Rockies series, which concluded Thursday with a bullpen game, as Rays relievers combined to pitch 17 2/3 innings over the past three days. Considering the state of the bullpen and the Yankees’ heavily right-handed lineup, Tampa Bay sent the side-arming right-hander Kelley to the mound in the seventh a day after he was recalled from Triple-A Durham.
Kelley walked LeMahieu and Aaron Judge with one out in the seventh, then served up an RBI double to Torres and a two-run double to Stanton. LeMahieu hit his second homer of the night off Kelley in the eighth before the right-hander struck out Judge to end his outing.
“My game is to go inside, and when I'm not getting that outside call, I feel like hitters are cheating in,” Kelley said. “They made the adjustments.”