Yankees ace Gerrit Cole having good time despite clock snafu
Gerrit Cole of the Yankees greets teammate catcher Jose Trevino as he leaves a game in the seventh inning against the Phillies at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Gerrit Cole’s nearly flawless streak to begin this season ended Wednesday afternoon during the Yankees’ 4-2 victory over the Phillies. But the only run to score off him in 13 innings so far probably deserves an asterisk. That’s how dominant the Yankees’ ace has been.
Cole didn’t even get a chance to throw a final pitch. His day ended on a clock violation, which resulted in a walk to the Phillies’ Nick Castellanos, who later scored on Jake Cave’s sacrifice fly off reliever Jonathan Loaisiga.
That’s what it takes to dent Cole these days. A technicality. For a guy whose pinstriped tenure had been a bit too vulnerable to teeing up runs on a swing and jog, Cole is being especially stingy through his first two starts. He’s struck out 19 and allowed only that new-rule-impacted run through 12 1/3 innings, stabilizing a Yankees rotation that lost three starters before Opening Day.
Asked to describe what he’s been seeing from Cole to this point, manager Aaron Boone paused for a moment. To him, it must have seemed like a rhetorical question.
“Well, he’s Gerrit Cole,” Boone said. “He walks out there with a lot of equipment. But I feel like he’s been in a good spot since Day One of spring training and he’s carried it right into the season.”
With a first-pitch temp of 48 degrees, spitting rain and chilly wind, this was not a fun day to be holding a bat, either against Cole or Phillies ace Aaron Nola. But once the Yankees nicked Nola for a 1-0 lead in the first inning, on the first of Gleyber Torres’ pair of RBI singles, Cole fiercely protected that narrow edge against the defending NL champs.
The Phillies put up minor threats on Bryson Stott’s two-out double in the second inning along with a pair of walks in the fifth, but Cole slammed the door each time. And in the sixth inning, with his pitch count nearing the limit, that’s where Cole delivered a statement against the top of the order.
Cole gunned a 98.8-mph four-seamer past a swinging Trea Turner for the first K, matching his top velo of the day, got the always-dangerous Kyle Schwarber on a fly ball to right, then whiffed J.T. Realmuto with a nasty 88-mph changeup. From there, Cole was on a batter-to-batter basis, and after he struck out Edmundo Sosa to open the seventh, he could be seen yelling over to Boone, “one more.”
By then, Cole was at 97 pitches, but wanted the final shot at Castellanos before calling it an afternoon. That’s when things went sideways.
“He was like, let me know,” Cole said of Boone. “I let him know I was good for the righthander [Castellanos].”
Or so he thought. Cole couldn’t have imagined what happened next. Through the first six pitches, it was pretty standard stuff, as Castellanos worked him to a full count. But when Cole looked to Trevino for No. 7, that led to the catcher cycling through his PitchCom — scrolling through the buttons — as Cole repeatedly shook him off. With the 15-second clock winding down, Trevino then spun his right hand, the universal signal for “hurry up” before plate umpire Nic Lentz finally called the automatic ball four.
The frustrated Cole screamed and the equally annoyed Boone popped from the dugout to relieve his ace. While the new clock has caused some aggravation around the league, Cole’s adjustment had been seamless from his first spring training start, so that glitch was surprising. The easy remedy was to burn a timeout, but in the heat of that moment, it got away from Cole and his catcher.
“We’ve just got to call a mound visit there,” Cole said. “It’s a bit unfortunate. It was my first one, so pretty poorly timed. But we’ll learn from it.”
That’s the positive. In retrospect, no harm done, and it didn’t turn out to be a game-deciding gaffe. Not only has Cole adapted to the clock with minimal turbulence, he’s pitched better than ever since arriving in the Bronx, particularly with his fastball location.
“Obviously when you’re going against him, guys are selling out to certain things,” Boone said. “When he’s really dotting his fastball like that, and dictating counts, and gaining leverage, you know you’ve got to deal with wipeout secondary stuff too. So I thought he did a good job of staying unpredictable in some situations where guys might have thought, he’s going to try to get me to expand here and he would dot up a fastball.”
Cole did exactly that in freezing Turner and Realmuto with 97-mph heaters in the first inning, two at-bats that sort of set the tone for his afternoon. His finish was not ideal, but Cole had the luxury of shrugging it off based on the end result.
“I don’t have a lot of experience with that one,” Cole said, smiling, “so it was my first time handling it.”
The way Cole’s pitching right now, it’s going to take a lot more than a clock to derail him.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
