July 25th, 2024
Bryan Hoch
@BryanHochNEW YORK – Gerrit Cole flipped his glove in the air with a disgusted eyeroll, his final pitch having landed in right field for a run-scoring single. Having voiced his intent to even a personal score, the Yankees ace instead exited another Subway Series game on the losing side.
Having surrendered four homers in a June 25 start at Citi Field, Cole said that he “owed” the Mets a strong performance, strong talk that aligned with the Yankees’ expressed belief that their month-long woes will soon end. That payback did not materialize, as the right-hander served up three homers in the Yankees’ 12-3 loss on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium.
“Unfortunately, I just let it get out of hand too much and didn’t give us a good chance to win the game,” Cole said. “We’re definitely sitting in it right now, and not happy about it.”
The defeat completed a Subway Series sweep for the Mets, who won all four meetings between the New York clubs this season. 2013 was the only other season in which the Mets swept the Subway Series, a year in which the injury-ravaged Yankees missed the postseason.
“Every loss matters for us,” said outfielder Juan Soto. “It can be [the Mets], or it can be whoever. We don’t want to lose to anybody. We want to win games. We want to go out there and dominate.”
That hasn’t happened much lately. Yet despite a summer skid that has seen them drop 22 of 32 games since June 15, these Yankees remain in playoff position -- surprisingly, still just 1 1/2 games behind the also-scuffling Orioles in the American League East.
“Nobody has higher expectations than us in that frickin’ room. We’re pissed off,” manager Aaron Boone said. “We’ve got to play better. This has gone on long enough. It’s very frustrating to go through, but I also know we’re competing our [tails] off. We’ve got to walk in with the right level of edge and willingness to compete, because no one is going to pull us out of this but us.”
For two calendar years, Boone has met challenging junctures by insisting that the club’s hopes and dreams are “right in front of us,” a phrase that now plays like nails on a chalkboard with more connected corners of the Bombers’ fan base.
Boone doubled and tripled down in the wake of Wednesday’s lopsided defeat; as awful as the scoreboard looked, and despite the red ink blotting the schedule calendars hanging in players’ lockers, playoff baseball is still within their reach.
“We’ve got to play better, OK?” Boone said. “We have a really good team that has played [crappy] of late. We need to be better. … I’ve said, it’s right in front of us. It is. It’s right in front of us, right? For as bad as it’s been, we’re also in a great position, and we’ve got to go play baseball the way we’re capable of playing.”
Thanks to their hot start, if the season ended on Wednesday, the Yankees would face the Twins in an American League Wild Card Series. With 58 games remaining, making up 1 1/2 games to reclaim the division lead would hardly require a 1978-style comeback.
And yet, for anyone who has watched the Yanks’ previous month-plus, that feels like a tall order. They’ve won consecutive games just once (July 12-13) over that span, going 1-8-2 in 11 series. Soto places his trust in the Yanks’ first 72 games, when they awoke in Boston on June 15 as the Majors’ first team to 50 victories.
“You’ve just got to see what we were doing at the beginning of the season,” Soto said. “I think that tells you that we have everything we need to go out there and dominate.”
Gleyber Torres and Soto hit early homers to support Cole, who had held opponents to one run over six innings in his previous outings against the Orioles and Rays. A rematch with the Mets proved a tough draw for Cole, though.
Tyrone Taylor hit a third-inning homer, Pete Alonso cracked a two-run shot in the fourth and Francisco Lindor parked a two-run blast in the fifth before Taylor ended Cole’s evening with a sixth-inning single, prompting his glove flip. Of the nine homers Cole has surrendered across 35 innings, seven have been to the Mets.
Cole said he believes the Yankees will turn this around because “we have a lot of talent in the room, and I do think we know how to play good baseball.”
“From a results perspective, we’re not getting what we want,” Cole said. “I see the clubhouse, the preparation there. People here early, working on things. People staying in Tampa or getting in the cage over the [All-Star] break. Those are the things that you look to see in situations like this, so I think the effort is there. But this is the big leagues. You’ve got to perform.”
