Gerrit Cole will need every bit of focus he can muster
It can be hard not to zoom out when a pitcher finds himself in the position Gerrit Cole will be in at Yankee Stadium on Saturday.
The Yankees not only are down 0-2 to the reviled Astros in the ALCS, but the losses have been alarming. They’ve struck out 30 times and scored four runs — calling into question their offensive model and putting a heavy load on their pitching staff against one of the most formidable teams in baseball. But Cole, who will try to prevent the Yankees from falling into a nearly insurmountable three-game hole, can’t think about that too much. If he has his way, he won’t consider it at all.
“If it's 2-0 or if it's 1-1 or it's 0-2, it just, it can't affect the way I go about my business,” he said after the Yankees' Game 2 loss in Houston. “We all have a job to do. We play each and every game in and of itself, play each and every pitch within each and every game until there's no more pitches to play, win or lose.”
Cole isn’t exactly the unemotional type — there’s been evidence of that throughout his career — but at his best, he’s laser-focused on the process and has shown a marked distaste for unnecessary distraction. (Remember when an Opening Day cameo by Billy Crystal caused a four-minute delay? He didn’t like that all that much, and it showed in his performance.)
And for him, it seems that the macro view of this series is just that — an unnecessary distraction. It doesn’t matter that the Yankees aren’t hitting, or that only one team in 39 has ever gone down by three games and come back to win a seven-game series. Those are things to maybe consider on his off day, but if he’s going to recreate his ALDS performance — particularly the one in Game 4 in which he saved the Yankees from elimination in Cleveland — focus is pivotal.
“Gerrit's pretty consistent in how he goes about things and his process, and I feel like he's pretty intense no matter what,” manager Aaron Boone said Friday. “He's locked in every day and really one of those guys that's hooked up every day and invested in everything, even on the days he doesn't pitch. But on the days he's pitching, there's an energy and a focus and an intensity that I don't think really changes based on score.”
In a season in which Cole occasionally hasn't been at his best, he’s done very well when working with a thin margin. In the nine games he pitched this year in which the Yankees scored two or fewer runs, he had a 1.88 ERA and held opponents to a .205 batting average — the best ERA and lowest opposing batting average of his career in that situation. He’s allowed three earned runs in two games in these playoffs and has a 2.81 career postseason ERA.
The margin gets thinner when you consider the big picture (sorry, Gerrit): Teams down 0-2 in a best-of-seven series have won 14 of 88 series, a difficult-but-doable 15.9% clinch rate. Going down 0-3 means that rate falls to 2.6%, with only four teams even making it to a Game 6. All of which means that Cole, Nestor Cortes and Game 5 starter Jameson Taillon have an epic battle ahead of them.
So what actually is Cole's mindset going into all of this?
“It's always a great pleasure to pitch at home in front of our fans. I'm sure there will be a bunch of pageantry and everything, so it should be a nice night,” he responded blandly.
And what of the little run support?
“I feel like I should probably dedicate all my focus to the Houston hitters,” he said, bland again.
But it doesn’t matter how he answered any of these questions Thursday. What matters is how he’ll answer them on the mound Saturday.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
