OAKLAND — The way Friday night unfolded was the exact type of game the Yankees envisioned when building this team.
Giancarlo Stanton, Luke Voit and Aaron Judge provided their signature power at the plate and Gerrit Cole did the same on the mound, carrying the Yankees (76-52) to a breezy 8-2 win against the free-falling A’s (70-59).
“We’ve played, obviously, a ton of close games,” Aaron Boone smirked after the game. “When Gerrit can go out and set the tone and that heavy offense really wears pitchers down, yeah, that’s ideal right there.”
“100 percent, this is what we thought we were going to do all year,” Voit added.
Things got off to a strange start when Oakland pitcher Sean Manaea was asked to change his glove prior to the first pitch. The issue was not due to a foreign substance, but rather to its funky coloring. Manaea was sporting a mint green glove — one that he’s been using all season — but tonight it was deemed too light and thus could have made the ball hard for hitters to pick up.
“The umpires saw that and saw his glove and said it was too light,” Boone explained. “We didn’t say anything about that.”
The glove must have been Manaea’s good luck charm, because the forest green one he switched to brought a cursed outcome for him. Manaea only stuck around for 4.1 innings. Each of the three beefy home runs came against him, and he allowed five earned runs for the third time this month.
Cole had no such issues. With his plain black glove and stoic appearance on the mound, Cole hit 98 mph on his very first pitch of the night. He got Matt Olson to strike out in the first inning on a pitch that hit 100 and did not look back from there. The strikeout was one of nine on the night for the California kid pitching in his home state for the first time since 2019. He threw 70 strikes in his 104 pitches and got out of his only real trouble of the evening on a premiere defensive play from Gio Urshela to squash the A’s simmering, bases loaded rally.
Cole got more than enough run support from the massive redwoods in the middle of the Yankees lineup, a group that Boone has taken to calling the “jumbo package.” Stanton’s bomb broke a scoreless tie in the top of the fourth and probably came close to breaking the sound barrier as well. The 472-foot monstrosity gave Stanton a home run in four straight games and left some lucky fan in the third deck with an unlikely souvenir.
“Watching Big G hit homers is my favorite thing in all of baseball,” Kyle Higashioka said. “It looks like it’s still rising every time it leaves the ballpark. We’re always trying to see if it’s 122 miles per hour or whatever.”
Voit and Judge’s homers didn’t travel as far, but they counted all the same. Voit followed suit with a solo crush job of his own after Stanton’s and Judge’s three-run shot an inning later blew the game open. In their postgame pressers, Stanton and Voit shared some insight about the ribbing they do in the dugout.
“We do a little bit of, ‘Is that all you got?'” Stanton grinned. “But it’s mostly praise. I don’t care if it’s right over the fence or 1,000 feet over.”
“I did joke,” Voit began. “That ball he hit (Thursday) definitely went over 500 feet but they said it was 436 feet. The one I hit (Friday) went 437 so I told him I got a little more pop than him.”
Friday’s game was the Yankees’ eighth in a row scoring at least five runs, making the miserable offense of the first half seem like a distant mirage. The club’s 13 wins in a row are very real though, and they’re showing no sign of slowing down.
“I feel like it’s been kind of gradual over the last couple months,” Boone said of his offense’s improvement. “It got a little bit better from where it was in April and May. The quality of the at-bats from the whole group is making us much tougher.”
The final four innings were, for once, mostly a formality. Rather than another game that came down to the wire, the Yankees were able to basically coast to the finish line. Joely Rodriguez relieved Cole and cracked the A’s door of hope open after Olson’s RBI single, but fireman Chad Green came in to extinguish things and keep the house from burning down.
Rodriguez and Green’s seventh inning was the tensest moment of the game, for sure, but the team’s recent run of prosperity made it feel as though things were always going to work out in the end. When Green got Josh Harrison to roll into an inning-ending double play, those feelings became actuality.
The eight and nine hitters — Andrew Velazquez and Higashioka — teamed up for two more runs in the ninth inning to really emphasize how well things are going for the Bombers right now. Velazquez whipped a double into the gap and Higashioka slapped an opposite field homer in the top of the ninth, with Judge adding to his RBI total on a single that scored DJ LeMahieu.
The insurance runs removed the possibility of a save situation, allowing Boone to go with Lucas Luetge for the ninth inning, yet another stroke of good fortune for this suddenly charmed team from the Bronx that can’t lose.