In any other season, Gerrit Cole is the main story and two sidebars. What did you eat for breakfast and how did you feed the Nationals with their lunch? No detail would be too small. This is when you are the great new Yankee who makes his debut.
Whether it’s called Clemens or Matsui, Giambi or A-Rod, Sabathia or Stanton, the treatment doesn’t falter. The Yankees’ history is to import the biggest baseball stars and then see how premieres similar to the first landing are released, only more obsessively.
But this is not a season. Of course. Cole made her debut on July 23 because the sports world stopped in March and only now is she crawling back, cautiously trying to navigate timetables amid a pandemic. MLB is the first in North America.
So Cole was behind a global pandemic as a story. It was also not as relevant as the pregame gestures against social injustice, which included the Nationals and Yankees holding together a 200-foot piece of black cloth and kneeling in unison for a minute before this season’s first national anthem. Major League Baseball.
As Cole 2020’s debut, it ended with a torrential downpour in the top of the sixth inning, because what we are going to do with sports this year is see if we can continue to increase the degree of difficulty. The game was called at the time, and Cole was joking on the phone with her wife, Amy, “I can’t believe I’m going to get a full one-hit game on my debut.”
Yes, in this case, five innings was a full game and a 4-1 win, and Adam Eaton’s first-inning home run was the only success that made a Washington lineup just a few points from which Cole faced twice. in the World Series last year. .
Cole, a lifelong Yankees fan, had dreamed of this moment. But not like that. He noted: “There was no buzz coming to the park. You are not listening to a full stadium. Then suddenly the switch is on. There is no accumulation, only dead silence.
Cole had seen his teammates in Yankees uniform before the game and “He hit me, this is real.” So even with the biggest game on his resume, Cole grew too big in compensation. His adrenaline took control of his body and he lost precise control of his throws.
The fact that he didn’t lose control of the game says something, yes, about Cole’s talent (he could still hit 99 mph when needed) and the challenged nature of the Nationals lineup, by Antony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman as early as last year. champion, and then opener day losing his best hitter, Juan Soto, to the coronavirus.
But there was also something about cunning and guts. Gary Sánchez said Cole “has it” and Aaron Boone admired the ability to “solve it.” Cole threw strike one at just 8 of 18 hitters, and he hit one of those he threw strike one at. Eight of the 18 nationals entered the 2-0, 2-1, or 3-1 hitter count. However, they only had Eaton’s success, when Cole perhaps became too dependent on his fastball, throwing 14 to open the game.
The right, however, never lets an entry or its number of releases drift away from it. In a highly anticipated pitching matchup, Cole had the support, as in Houston, of a powerful lineup to counter Scherzer, who struck out 11 and in many ways was better than Cole, even delivering four runs.
Giancarlo Stanton hit a 459-foot homer and two runs in the first and a RBI single in the fifth. Aaron Judge crashed in his first two at-bats, including an RBI double in the third. That hit scored Tyler Wade from first place. Boone decided to stop DJ LeMahieu as he just wasn’t ready after missing most of Spring Training 2.0 with the coronavirus. Wade started in the second. He walked and scored, flying around the bases in the third. And he had a simple touch to help the Yankees in their career in the fifth inning.
Cole led by striking out the last two hitters he faced in the fifth, making it an official game. It was not the great story of a normal year. But this is not a normal year. Still, through the unique and the strange, Cole said, “I had a blast.”
Clearly, the happiness on Day 1 for Cole was honoring the role as the new big Yankee.
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