BOSTON — You don’t pay a pitcher $324 million for two innings in a playoff game.
That’s exactly what the Yankees got from Gerrit Cole in Tuesday’s American League Wild Card game, though. The ace pitcher, whom the Yankees backed up the Brinks truck for prior to the 2020 season, recorded only six outs, allowing three earned runs, four hits, two costly walks and two even more damaging home runs.
“I didn’t perform the way I wanted to tonight,” Cole said. “Sick to my stomach. This is the worst feeling in the world.”
When he was pulled from the game, Cole appeared to tell the team huddled on the mound, “I’m out.”
“I just wanted to stop Kyle (Higashioka). He was talking about the sequence he wanted to throw to Bogaerts,” Cole said. “I wanted to tell him to get his mind on Clay (Holmes) because he took me out.”
The man who took him out gave his typically positive spin on a messy, negative outcome.
“I thought the stuff was there,” Aaron Boone said. “They got some slug on pitches that leaked back into the middle. Just a little misfire on a couple and they made him pay.”
This was by far the shortest outing of Cole’s 14 postseason starts. Before Tuesday night’s debacle, he had thrown at least five innings each time he took the ball in the playoffs. His shortest start of this regular season had been 3.1 innings when he only made it through 19 Mets hitters. Tuesday in Boston only brought him 12. The choice to yank Cole was surely a jarring one for Boone, but it needed to happen.
“Not easy, especially how great of a pitcher that Gerrit is and how much respect I have for him,” Boone said. “That’s a difficult decision, but one that I needed to make.”
Cole threw 50 pitches to those 12 hitters and only yielded nine swings and misses. A two-out walk to Rafael Devers in the bottom of the first started Cole’s poorly-timed meltdown. The base on balls became two runs when Bogaerts homered in the next at-bat. The home run pitch was truly as bad of a mistake as a pitcher could make, as Cole’s changeup did not dart out of the zone as he would have wanted, instead remaining right down the middle for the Red Sox shortstop to tee off.
Kyle Schwarber got him in the bottom of the third with a 435-foot solo home run, his second titanic blast off Cole in a Wild Card game. That pitch wasn’t straight down the middle like the one that Bogaerts cracked. Instead, it was up and out of the strike zone on a 97 mile per hour fastball. Of Schwarber’s 29 home runs on the season, 23 came on a fastball, making the decision to throw him one with two strikes a bit questionable.
A subsequent single by Kiké Hernandez and another walk to Devers was the last thing Cole saw before Aaron Boone snatched the ball from him to put the star pitcher out of his misery. Cole said he didn’t think the hamstring issue that removed him early from the game on Sept. 7 was to blame for the Wild Card game blowing up in his face.
In his press conference a day before the game, Cole told the media at Fenway Park that “I’m just going to have to be on top of my game. Going to have to locate pitches in big spots.”
That did not come to fruition for Cole and the Yankees, who watched him slink off the mound with no outs in the bottom of the third inning, down 3-0, a walking example of a pitcher who was not on top of their game.
Clay Holmes cleaned up Cole’s mess, getting a big strikeout on Bogaerts and forcing Alex Verdugo to bounce into a 5-4-3 double play to end the third inning.
