SAN DIEGO — Gerrit Cole arrived at Petco Park on Sunday one win away from baseball history that no other pitcher has ever claimed. He left it holding a very different kind of record, one he would gladly hand back.
The Yankees ace had spent the week climbing a ladder few players ever reach. He entered the day with 161 career victories, the most by any pitcher taken with the No. 1 overall pick in the MLB Draft. That total tied him with Mike Moore, the top selection by Seattle in 1981. Cole, chosen first by Pittsburgh in 2011 after starring at UCLA, needed a single win against San Diego to break the tie and own the mark outright.
For a resume that already includes the 2023 American League Cy Young Award, six All-Star selections and more than 2,300 strikeouts, it would have been a fitting new line. The timing carried extra weight, too. Cole was pitching this season only after returning from Tommy John surgery that wiped out his entire 2025 campaign.
The Yankees, chasing their own prize in a tight postseason race, needed the win as badly as their ace did. New York came in trailing Tampa Bay in the AL East and clinging to the top American League wild-card spot. A rubber match against the Padres offered a chance to steady a rotation that has carried question marks all summer.
Instead, the afternoon curdled inside 15 pitches, and Cole walked into a record book he never wanted to enter. He forced the Yankees into a 4-3 loss.
The record no pitcher had ever owned
Cole became the only pitcher in major league history to open a game by allowing three straight home runs to the first three batters more than once in a career. It is a distinction built entirely from misfortune, and it now belongs to him alone.
Fernando Tatis Jr. led off the bottom of the first and drove a knuckle curve the other way, 371 feet into the right-field seats. Jake Cronenworth followed by pulling a four-seam fastball 343 feet down the left-field line. Manny Machado needed no such subtlety. He crushed a fastball 416 feet to dead center, a 109-mph blast that made it back-to-back-to-back and put the Padres up 3-0 before the Yankees had batted.
It was only the second time in Padres history a lineup opened a game that way. The other came in 1987. For Cole and the Yankees, though, the more painful history was personal.
An echo of a 2022 nightmare
The reason Sunday carried a record was that Cole had lived the same opening once before. On June 9, 2022, at Minnesota, he served up leadoff homers to Luis Arraez, Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa. That start unraveled quickly, and Cole was gone after 2 1/3 innings having allowed five home runs.
The Yankees salvaged that day anyway, rallying for a 10-7 win behind two Joey Gallo homers and a game-tying blast from Aaron Hicks. The comeback softened the memory. The three-homer opening, it turned out, was only paused, not retired.
Ty France nearly extended Sunday’s barrage to a fourth straight homer, sending a fly ball to the warning track in center before it died. Cole avoided that footnote, then settled in and kept the Yankees within range.
Cole keeps his focus narrow
Rather than dwell on the sequence, Cole framed it as a hazard of the job and pointed to the work still in front of him. His comments after the game reflected a pitcher unwilling to let one inning define the outing or the stretch run.
“They put really good swings on the ball,” Cole said. “Sometimes it is what it is. You’ve got to separate that from doing your job, which is to continue to take it one pitch at a time and leave the mistakes behind you. You keep working.”
The numbers backed his point. After the opening blasts, Cole allowed only one more run, a leadoff homer by catcher Luis Campusano in the seventh. He finished seven innings on 84 pitches, striking out three. Strip away the first 15 pitches, and it was the kind of efficient start the Yankees have wanted from him since his return.
With his three strikeouts, Cole also tied Al Downing for 11th on the Yankees’ all-time strikeout list at 1,028, a reminder of the standing he holds in Yankees pitching lore even on a rough day.
The draft-pedigree record still waiting on one win
Lost in the noise of the negative mark is a piece of context that reframes the whole afternoon, and it is the part most worth holding onto. Cole’s pursuit of the No. 1-overall wins record is not over. It is merely postponed.
He remains tied with Moore at 161 victories. One more win moves Cole past a pitcher who last threw a big-league pitch in 1995.
Reaching 162 wins after a full year lost to elbow reconstruction would say something about staying power that a single rough first inning cannot erase. Cole, the Yankees’ highest-paid arm, entered the day 161-87 for his career after tying Moore on Sept. 1 against the Los Angeles Angels.
The chase now carries into his next turn, which sets up a small measure of intrigue for a rotation the Yankees need to hold firm down the stretch.
Former Yankee Michael King, dealt to San Diego in the December 2023 Juan Soto trade, outpitched Cole with six scoreless innings and took the win. Mason Miller closed the ninth for his 33rd save. The Yankees pushed a late rally to within 4-3 but stranded the tying run.
New York flew home at 81-62, still second in the AL East and four games behind Tampa Bay with 19 to play. The Yankees kept a firm hold on the top wild-card berth, sitting 2 1/2 games clear of Boston. A six-game homestand against the Rockies and Mets opens Tuesday, with growing optimism that Aaron Judge could rejoin the lineup during the week.
Cole’s next start will come with the same one-win gap still open. The record he wants remains a single victory away. The one he does not want is already permanent.
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