BOSTON — Gerrit Cole reached for an answer in the third inning Saturday, somewhere between a two-run double off the Green Monster and an underhand toss from his first baseman. The Yankees ace stopped trying to be perfect. The pitches got better. The result did not.
By the time the Yankees ace settled into the version of himself the team is still waiting on, Boston had already built a lead his slumping lineup had no chance of erasing.
Cole took the loss in a 4-1 defeat to the last-place Red Sox at Fenway Park, the third straight setback in a series the Yankees once expected to control. He allowed four earned runs over 5.1 innings, scattering seven hits with a walk and five strikeouts on 89 pitches.
The line itself was not a disaster. The pattern around it is what should concern New York.
Seven starts into his return from Tommy John surgery, Cole has stopped looking like a finished product and started looking like a project. The Yankees built their summer on the idea that their 35-year-old ace would round into form as October neared. Saturday offered a reminder that the timeline is not guaranteed, and that the rebuild of Gerrit Cole is still very much underway.
This was supposed to be a soft landing. Boston entered the day 11 games under .500 and ranked near the bottom of the majors in home offense. Cole figured to be due for a bounce-back. Instead, the Red Sox jumped him for four runs in the first three innings, a hole the Yankees’ cold lineup treated as a death sentence.
A mid-start switch that came too late
Cole’s afternoon turned on a single mental adjustment. After Willson Contreras smoked a two-run double off the wall in the third, first baseman Paul Goldschmidt flipped Cole the ball on his walk back to the mound. Cole accepted that his best command was not coming, and decided to stop chasing it.
From there the Yankees ace retired eight of the next 10 batters, working around a pair of singles before Caleb Durbin’s single in the sixth ended his day. The shift was real. So was the damage already done.
Cole explained the change in approach and why he leaned into aggression rather than precision.
“I just tried to free myself up, to be honest,” Cole said. “The command just sometimes isn’t there, so I just tried to be more aggressive and not care as much about where the pitch was going, or not really try to define the pitch too much by jamming it into one area, and just, just attack.”
The aggression bought him a strong finish. It did not buy back the early runs, and that is the part Cole keeps running into.
Reflecting on the mistakes that piled up before the adjustment, the Yankees ace measured how thin the margin had become.
“The reality is, it’s probably close,” Cole said. “But this is the big leagues, so sometimes close isn’t good enough.”
The four-seamer keeps betting against him
Every run-producing hit Saturday came off Cole’s four-seam fastball. Masataka Yoshida ambushed his second pitch of the game for a leadoff homer, an unlikely blow from a designated hitter who entered with two home runs all season. Anthony Seigler, a former Yankees first-round pick playing his 10th big league game, cleared the wall in the second for the first homer of his career. Then came the Contreras double, a 114-mph rocket to deep left-center.
Boston tagged Cole for nine hard-hit balls in all. His velocity was not the issue. His four-seamer averaged better than 97 mph, above his season norm, and most of his arsenal sat up. The misses, not the stuff, did the harm.
There is a recent precedent that makes the trend harder to wave off. Cole’s last start before Saturday, a clunker in Detroit, ended a five-start run of dominance. At the time it looked like a blip. Two outings later, it looks like the start of something the Yankees have to track. Across his first five starts back, Cole posted a 2.57 ERA and held hitters to a .196 average. Across his last two, he carries an 8.38 ERA.
Yankees catcher Austin Wells framed the outing as part of a longer climb back, describing the slow process of a pitcher rediscovering his feel after surgery.
“For him, coming back off surgery, there’s going to be little things that you slowly start to unlock,” Wells said, “and start to feel like yourself again.”
A June that has flipped the narrative
The bigger picture is no longer flattering. After throwing 12.2 scoreless innings across his first two starts back in late May, Cole carries a 6.12 ERA over his past five outings. The Yankees ace has surrendered nine earned runs in his last two starts spanning 9.2 innings.
His month closed at a 6.12 ERA, his worst in any calendar month with at least 25 innings since June 2017, when he was still a Pirate, according to StatMuse. His season ERA sits at 4.06. Fenway remains his personal house of horrors. He owns a career mark there worse than at any park where he has made more than three starts.
New York can absorb it for now. The Yankees fell to 48-34 but remain firmly in the American League East race. The Red Sox, basement dwellers at 35-46, are no measuring stick. Still, the rotation is leaning on Cole to be a front-line arm by October, and right now he is a work in progress turning the ball over to the bullpen earlier than planned. Brent Headrick relieved him Saturday and stranded an inherited runner.
Boone, who has watched Cole grind through the comeback, said he took the most encouragement from how his ace attacked once he let go of the need to be flawless.
“I take a little bit of encouragement out of what I saw from him in the final few innings,” Boone said. “He was like, screw this, let’s get after it, let’s go.”
Whether that late flip becomes a turning point or just a footnote will define the next month for the Yankees. Cole pitches again next time out, far from Jersey Street, with a chance to prove Saturday’s finish meant something. The warning light is blinking. The Yankees are betting it goes dark before the games start to matter.
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