Not surprisingly, among Cole’s biggest challenges has been not letting the ball slip out of his hands.
Gerrit Cole said he was just trying to “survive” as a pitcher after baseball started checking for foreign substances on balls. Regardless of the stuff that day, that’s my sole focus: to try to go deep in the game and keep runs off the board.” “Maybe the lines didn’t look as miraculous as some of my top-end starts, but the runs were fine.
“I just tried to survive,” Cole said prior to his most recent start, when he limited the Orioles to a run in five innings in his first outing since suffering a tight left hamstring. Over a month-long stretch from June 3 to July 4, Cole pitched to a 5.24 ERA over six outings and allowed 10 homers in 34 ⅓ innings.īut Cole has bounced back (allowing only five earned runs in his last six starts) and will have to continue to pitch like his salary demands if the Yankees are going to get to the playoffs and make any kind of run.Īsked about the adjustments he has made since the enforcement of the ban on sticky stuff, Cole said, “Personally, I’m past it.” The right-hander put a scare into many when he all but admitted to using Spider Tack prior to MLB’s crackdown on foreign substances and then went out and looked nothing like the $324 million ace the Yankees signed prior to last season. Sign up here to get Inside the Yankees delivered to your inbox each Friday morning.īALTIMORE - The Yankees don’t seem to have a Gerrit Cole problem anymore.