NEW YORK — Three solo strolls defined Gerrit Cole’s evening.
The first came around 6:20 p.m. The Yankees ace, in full uniform, trudged toward the home bullpen to begin warming up for his start. As he inched across the checker-patterned outfield grass, a soft cheer rose from a group of early arriving fans down the right-field line. It was Cole’s first home outing since a Sept. 14 stinker against the Red Sox, during which he became the talk of baseball when he intentionally walked Rafael Devers with the bases empty. Some Yankees fans booed him off the mound that afternoon.
A few hours later, around 9:15 p.m., Cole took a much shorter walk, still technically alone, from the mound to the dugout. The reigning AL Cy Young winner had just dismantled the Orioles’ lineup across 6 2/3 scoreless innings. His Yankees, needing a win to clinch the AL East, led 7-0 and eventually won 10-1. A grateful, raucous Yankee Stadium crowd stood and cheered. Cole tipped his cap, high-fived his way through a tunnel of pinstripes and descended into the clubhouse.
Around 10:20 p.m., Cole retraced those steps.
Wearing a navy blue “WE OWN THE EAST” T-shirt sopped in sparkling wine, the $324 million man hurried up the dugout stairs and onto the field. Most of his teammates waited in center field, eagerly setting up for a team photo. Some, including team captain and AL MVP favorite Aaron Judge, carried golden bottles. Cole, his eyes bleary and bloodshot from the celebratory geysers of alcohol, hustled across the diamond to join the party he’d made possible.
The Yankees, as they did for the first two-and-a-half months of this season, waited for their ace.
“[Tonight] was just a little peek at his brilliance, really,” Yankees skipper Aaron Boone gushed after the game.
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Cole, the club’s most dependable pitcher since he signed with New York in December 2019, began 2024 in a haze of uncertainty. During spring training, the 34-year-old felt a pang of discomfort in his right elbow. Player and club, knowing that such pain is so often a harbinger of Tommy John surgery, feared the worst. On March 13, the Yankees announced that Cole did not have a ligament tear but would still be on the shelf for at least two months to rest his ailing arm.
The team dodged the cannonball but took some shrapnel. A significant stretch without its most important pitcher loomed.
Cole did not throw off a mound until May 4. He did not make a major-league start until June 19 and did not throw a pitch in the sixth inning until July 12. Even after his somewhat miraculous return, there were still questions about his efficacy. He held a 5.09 ERA after eight starts. But since Aug. 10, he has been vintage Cole, total brilliance with a 2.15 ERA over a string of nine starts, including a complete-game, one-run gem in Oakland his previous turn.
On Thursday, he willed the Yankees to a win, to a division title. Facing off against Orioles ace Corbin Burnes, the Yankees took an early 1-0 lead on a solo home run by Giancarlo Stanton. Burnes was otherwise sensational. But Cole was better, hitting 98 mph, tossing zero after zero onto the scoreboard. At one point, frustrated with a call from home-plate umpire David Rackley, he stared daggers through him on his way to the dugout after the inning.
He looked nothing like the man who dodged danger against the Red Sox two weeks prior.
“I thought we mixed really well,” Cole said after the game. “I thought Austin [Wells] was really sharp with our reads. We played great defense. G [Stanton] popping them in the [second] there gave us a little bit of cushion to keep attacking.”
Cole’s counterpart exited after the fifth, with the score 1-0 and the Orioles presumably hoping to keep Burnes well-rested for Game 1 of next week’s wild-card series. New York pounced at the opportunity, exploding for a six-run sixth against Baltimore’s overmatched bullpen. Aaron Judge added on a moon-scraping blast in the seventh, his 58th of the season. He has homered in five straight games.
Boone, in his postgame news conference, admitted he didn’t even realize that streak. Such is the boring brilliance of the game’s best hitter.
Overall, it was a performance that represented the best version of the 2024 Yankees: shutdown starting pitching and a power-oriented, star-studded offense capable of overwhelming an opponent’s lesser relievers.
The Yankees might well face this same Orioles team, one picked to win the division by many a prognosticator, next month when the games really matter. There’s no question that a summer swoon from a banged-up Baltimore team played a role in New York’s division title. But when the Orioles tumbled off a cliff in August, the Yankees held on. Enduring the bumps to win the AL East, considering the magnitude of expectations that surround this team, is its own accomplishment.
Winning in The Bronx is in some ways a higher level, a harder task. Every minor blunder becomes a headline in YankeeWorld. That means stakes are greater, the highs higher, the lows lower. Scrutiny is omnipresent, like the permanent hum of noise that blankets this city. Boone, at the helm since 2018, understands that dynamic. So do Judge and Cole.
That’s why they signed up to play here. Pressure makes diamonds, as they say, and nobody has more of both than the New York Yankees. In this town, it’s always World Series or bust — an unfair edict, given the ever-growing randomness of baseball’s postseason tournament. But that’s the reality here: The true measure of any Yankees season is what happens when the weather gets colder.
It was muggy on Thursday, but Gerrit Cole looked ready for the chill.
“It was a special night,” he said after the game. “This is what you want as a player. The division is right there for the taking.
“You’ve got to go out there and get it.”
