NEW YORK — With the game on the line, as he always does, Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake scrutinized his ace. Gerrit Cole had left a four-seamer over the plate to the Guardians’ Steven Kwan and watched it land in the right field stands. He had hit the next batter, and the one after that had doubled. Blake had trudged to the mound to remind Cole to keep the moment small, to focus pitch by pitch, to miss in the right places.
Now, perched in the dugout during the third inning of the first game of the American League Division Series, Blake watched Cole’s face. Blake saw intention. He watched the way Cole took his time climbing the rubber. Blake saw control. He watched Cole face the next batter. Blake saw potential for catastrophe.
Cole induced a ground ball; first baseman Anthony Rizzo fielded it and threw to catcher José Trevino, who threw to third baseman Josh Donaldson. They failed to record the out. With one out and the bases loaded, the next batter grounded to Donaldson; he went home for the out instead of trying for the double play. Bases loaded, two out. With a 1–2 count to Andres Giménez, Cole’s slider clipped the bottom of the zone but was called ball 2.
“The inning kind of continued to go,” Blake said when it was over and the Yankees had won 4–1 on the strength of Cole’s best playoff start in two years. “It felt like the moments kept building, and I thought for him, that was great to just continue to keep it small, continue to execute.”
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Blake thought back to an outing in September against the Red Sox: Cole had thrown what he believed to be strike 3. The umpire called it ball 2. “He kind of lost his mind a little bit and tried to challenge him,” Blake said. The next pitch was a three-run home run. But on Tuesday, Blake said, Cole “didn’t lose it. He made another good pitch and ended up getting him to punch out on a comparable one.”
Said manager Aaron Boone, “That may be the at bat of the game right there. He was in some trouble there, and [he] kept making pitches.”
Cole, 32, grew up a Yankees fan in Newport Beach, Calif., and he can sometimes assign too much importance to his role as the ace of his childhood club. This was his first playoff start here for the home team, and he was keenly aware of what that meant. His great challenge, Blake said, is to “release the ‘perfect’ notion and just be really good.”
He was really good on Tuesday. The Guardians were an interesting matchup for Cole, a classic opportunity to pit strength against strength. Cole led the majors in strikeouts this year with 257—that’s 11.5 per nine innings, second among AL starters. No team in the sport is harder to strike out than the Guardians. Cole also led the majors in home runs allowed, with 33 in 33 starts. Only the 96-loss Tigers hit fewer dingers than the Guardians.
So he visualized allowing baserunners, and he visualized allowing himself to stay calm. He pitched backwards at first, establishing the breaking ball early in counts because the scouting reports told him Cleveland hitters might take them for strikes. They forced him to throw 39 pitches through two, but he also whiffed four of them through two frames, only the fourth time this season a pitcher has done that.
And then as the third inning began, he noticed what he called “a conscious effort there to be a little more disciplined to the breaking ball.” So he began leaning on his four-seamer to keep them off balance.
“A lot of times the swing-and-miss also ends up in areas that they do damage, so you’re flirting with danger over there,” Blake said. “There’s other areas where you may not get as much swing-and-miss, but you’re away from the barrel, and I thought he did a good job going into those areas to control the pitch count, especially later on.”
Cole survived a 23-pitch third, and noted wryly that the bottom of the Yankees’ order was up: With the Guardians up 1–0, if they’d been playing under the former National League rules, he realized, Boone might have chosen to double-switch him out. Boone, for his part, wondered if Cole could even go five innings.
But New York’s No. 9 hitter, center fielder Harrison Bader, evened the score with a solo home run in the bottom of the inning, and Cole needed only eight pitches to finish the fourth.
“That kind of got him back into the game,” said Guardians manager Terry Francona.
Cole worked around a walk in the fifth, retired them in order in the sixth and came out for the seventh at 97 pitches. He got the first out, but when a line drive just evaded the glove of shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Boone came to get him. The Yankees’ bullpen is in tatters—one reliever, Ron Marinaccio, recently hit the injured list with a stress reaction in his right shin; another, Scott Effross, announced Tuesday that he unexpectedly needs Tommy John surgery; and a third, Aroldis Chapman, who has been ineffective recently but has a 2.40 ERA in 35 career postseason games, skipped a mandatory workout and was left off the roster—so the extra four outs from Cole could have a real impact later in the series.
Afterward, Cole reflected on his first playoff appearance in the Bronx as a Yankee. “Sometimes when you feel the crowd or the energy, it sometimes can become a little easier just to quiet things down, because it's so loud,” he said, then laughed. “I don't know if that makes sense, but it does to me.”
The Yankees won. Cole pitched well. When Blake looked at his ace’s face after the game, all he saw was joy.
