Gerrit Cole seemingly caught a break before Thursday’s game even began, as his greatest adversary in the Rays’ lineup, Ji-Man Choi, sat out due to injury.
The Rays who played, though, didn’t make Cole’s life much easier.
A lack of upper-zone command and a costly two-out rally forced Cole out after five innings in a 9-2 loss to Tampa Bay at Yankee Stadium. Instead of rebounding from last weekend’s sweep against the Tigers with a series win, New York settled for a four-game split against the division-rival Rays.
With the Yanks’ ace on the mound -- the same one who fanned 12 Rays over eight scoreless innings in his previous outing against them -- it’s fair for them to have hoped for more.
But Cole struggled to effectively elevate his fastball, firing too many misplaced “noncompetitive” pitches, by his own assessment.
“If I remember [in my last start] in [St. Petersburg], we were rifling balls at the top of the strike zone all day,” Cole said. “And today we were up about six or seven inches, or we were in spots where we could’ve grabbed the count to go to our leverage, or pressured with two strikes.”
That spelled trouble for the hard-throwing righty, who used his fastball 43.4 percent of the time, his lowest rate over his past six starts. Without a steady diet of elevated heaters -- which catcher Kyle Higashioka described as “one of [Cole’s] main weapons” -- his offspeed stuff became easier to anticipate. Coincidence or not, all five hits against Cole came on offspeed pitches.
That included a pair of two-out RBI singles in the fifth inning that broke the game open. New York trailed, 2-1, at the time, before Brandon Lowe hooked a changeup to right to score one and Yandy Díaz lined an elevated slider up the middle to plate two more.
The strike zone from home-plate umpire Chad Whitson was a point of contention for Yankees manager Aaron Boone, and arguing balls and strikes eventually led to him getting tossed in the seventh inning. Boone said afterward he thought there were some calls for Cole that “didn’t go his way,” particularly in the fifth, but Cole was more concerned about his own efforts.
“There were too many fastballs above the zone that had an opportunity to press the corners,” Cole said. “Commanding that better, maybe, doesn’t make some of the questionable calls quite so magnified.”
Cole figures to have plenty more chances to rebound, especially, it seems, against the Rays: Thursday’s matinee marked his 12th start against them since the beginning of the 2019 season.
“This club battles me hard, I battle them hard,” Cole said. “We have a lot of competition between us. They’ve certainly won some rounds, and I’ve certainly won some rounds. ... The bottom line is, I’ve just got to be better my next time out against them.”
Often it’s Cole -- he of the 2.26 ERA, with more strikeouts (104) through 12 starts than any pitcher in Yankees history -- who picks up New York’s hitters. This time, when he needed them to rescue the day, all they could muster was a pair of solo shots: one each from Brett Gardner (his first of the season) and Miguel Andújar (his third in the past four games). The Yanks are now 0-15 when allowing five or more runs this season.
Thursday was a chance to take three of four from a Rays team that entered as the hottest bunch in baseball, with 15 wins in 16 games entering this series. The Yanks missed, but there’s little time to dwell. On Friday, the Red Sox come to town for 2021’s debut edition of the storied rivalry.
“[I’m] frustrated that we didn’t go out and get it done today,” Boone said. “But you also have to get past it right now and know we’ve got a big one starting this weekend.”