Gerrit Cole left Yankee Stadium with a line score that looked bad enough on its own, then made it worse with what he said afterward.
The Yankees’ ace was hit hard in Saturday’s 12-2 loss to the Mets, giving up five runs and nine hits in 4 1/3 innings. Both were season highs.
He was done after the fifth inning, met by boos as he came off the mound, and his ERA climbed to 3.67 while his record fell to 8-9. It was his shortest start since June, and it came with another ugly number attached: three more home runs.
That has become the bigger problem. Cole has now allowed seven homers over his last two starts, the most he has ever given up in a two-start stretch. Francisco Lindor set the tone by taking him deep on the third pitch of the game.
But the most troubling part of the day was not the damage itself. It was Cole’s own explanation, or lack of one.
The stuff is still there. The results are not.
Cole’s fastball averaged 96.9 mph on Saturday, right in line with his season average, and reached 98.7. He said he feels healthy.
The radar gun says the arm is there. Yet the Mets barely missed him, producing just three swings and misses on 40 swings, and none came against his four-seamer.
He struck out only four.
That disconnect is what has made this stretch so jarring. Cole’s whiff rate is down to 22.3% this season, below the major league average of about 25%, and nowhere near the 34.1% he posted in 2022. The swing-and-miss that once defined him has been slipping for years, and this month it has taken another step back.
Cole said it’s difficult to compare what he’s doing now with past seasons because the game itself has changed, pointing in part to the automated ball-strike challenge system.
“I think it’s hard to compare to previous years without pitching with the ABS,” Cole said. “I think maybe chase and swing and miss across the board is down. So trying to find where those numbers would be relative to this environment is something that we need to navigate.”
He also said the Mets have been a particularly rough matchup. Saturday was his 20th start of the year, and he now owns a 7.28 ERA in 10 career starts against New York, his worst mark against any team. He did not want to hang Saturday’s outing on his 2024 Tommy John surgery, though he admitted it was fair to wonder about it.
“Hard for me to pin it on one thing,” Cole said. “It’s a long season.
Hitters are good, offenses are good. High-stakes games with good offenses, sometimes they teach you lessons.
Like today.”
What stood out most was how little certainty he offered. Cole, one of the game’s most detailed and analytical pitchers, usually sounds like a man with a blueprint. This time, he sounded like someone still searching for the edges of the problem.
“A straightforward observation is that the hitters are seeing the ball well and being able to deliver good strikes to it, regardless of the pitch type or really the location,” Cole said.
Asked whether he knew exactly what adjustments he needed, he was blunt.
“Not necessarily,” he said.
That is where this gets uncomfortable for the Yankees. They are counting on Cole to anchor a rotation built for October, and they need him to be the pitcher they trust in a short series. A former Cy Young winner trying to sort this out in mid-September is not what they had in mind.
Still, the Yankees are not sounding the alarm. Aaron Boone pointed to Cole’s willingness to work in the strike zone and said the stuff remains intact.
“I think part of it is the product of being in the strike zone as much as he is,” Boone said. “I feel like the stuff is there. It’s just that last layer of execution, and that’s the fine line between getting hit a little bit and not.”
Boone also brushed aside any suggestion of a lingering issue.
“I expect him to be right next time,” Boone said.
Spencer Jones backed that confidence, too.
“If there’s anybody who can bounce back and know what to do, it’s going to be that guy,” Jones said. “He’s as smart and professional as any pitcher in the game. He’s going to be just fine.”
The calendar, though, is tightening fast. The Yankees could have clinched a postseason berth Saturday with a win and a Blue Jays loss, but that chance passed.
Now they have 14 games left in 15 days, and Cole has at most two starts to figure out what he openly admitted he does not yet know. The arm looks fine.
The velocity is there. The answers are not.
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