Mets stick a fork in Yankees' season by knocking out Gerrit Cole, Aroldis Chapman in opener of Subway Series doubleheader
Gerrit Cole of the Yankees leaves a game against the Mets in the fourth inning during the first game of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The Mets didn’t just clinch this edition of the Subway Series with Sunday’s 10-5 Game 1 beatdown in the Bronx.
They unofficially stuck a fork in the Yankees’ season. On July 4th. George Steinbrenner’s birthday.
Cooked. Done. Finished. Scraped off the grill and tossed in the garbage can.
How satisfying for the Flushing Nine and their newly emboldened fan base. How utterly miserable for the venerable Yankees, who lately have been transformed into pinstriped bowling pins, getting smashed by the Red Sox at Fenway Park and humiliated by the Mets.
The Yankees suffered their two worst losses of the season in a span of five days (remember Wednesday’s rain-soaked meltdown?), and there’s no reason to believe the bottom has been reached. Why should anyone think a rebound is right around the corner?
Their descent was slowed some with a 4-2 win in Game 2, but the Yankees still very much feel like the "falling stone" that GM Brian Cashman alluded to earlier in the week. They are barely above .500 (42-41) and 10 games out of first.
In Game 1 of Sunday’s split doubleheader, Gerrit Cole spit up a 4-1 lead and couldn’t finish the fourth inning, his shortest outing in five years. Aaron Boone’s faith in his $324 million ace is so eroded that he didn’t trust him to get two more outs. And once the manager took the ball, Cole was loudly booed on his slow walk to the dugout.
"It is what it is," Cole said. "You sign up for it when you come here. It’s not a good feeling and you just try to pitch well enough so that doesn’t happen."
Can Cole even do that anymore? Since June 3, with reports intensifying about the sticky-stuff crackdown and minor-league pitchers getting suspended, Cole is 2-3 with a 5.24 ERA in six starts. That’s not even mediocre. And no way do the Yankees climb off the mat with Cole scuffling like a middle-of-the-rotation piece.
But wait — there’s more. Chapman also remains a mess, and Boone was so confident in his crumbling closer that he stuck with him for three whole batters — none of whom he retired — in the seventh inning before fetching him, too. Just like Cole.
Chapman teed up a terrible slider to Pete Alonso, who hammered it into the Mets’ bullpen to tie the score at 5, then drilled Michael Conforto in the back with a 100-mph fastball. It wasn’t on purpose — Chapman has no clue where his pitches are going these days — and a walk to Jeff McNeil put him out of his misery.
For now, anyway.
If Boone knows what’s good for him, we shouldn’t see Chapman in the closer’s role for a while. In his last nine appearances, a total of 5 2⁄3 innings, Chapman has allowed 14 earned runs, jumping his ERA from 0.39 to 4.71. Hardly All-Star quality, even if he did officially get the nod between Sunday’s games.
Boone could have stuck with the reliable Chad Green, who threw only two pitches to protect the 5-4 lead in the sixth, but the manager later said he needed to save him for the nightcap. Boone later got lucky when the Yankees jumped in front and Green pitched three perfect innings (six strikeouts) to nail down the win.
But that didn’t excuse not riding Green with Game 1 seemingly in hand.
And an already difficult task just got 10 times harder with Cole and Chapman looking average and atrocious, respectively.
"We can’t get to where we want to go without those two guys, obviously," Boone said. "Those two guys are critical to what we do."
What the Yankees mostly do now is roll over.
And the Mets? They’re the polar (bear) opposite, a grinding group with building momentum and a roster getting healthier by the day.
"It was just such a great collective effort," Alonso said after Game 1. "We just didn’t back down from a challenge from the first to last pitch of the game. And that’s who we are. That’s our identity. Regardless of what’s in front of us, we never back down. We’re always going full bore right at you and we want to continue to play like that."
That’s why the Mets have been atop the NL East for 73 days, the longest stretch in the majors, and left their crosstown rivals in even worse shape than when they arrived.
"Another awful loss," Boone said of the opener. "There’s no other way to put it."
Just add it to the growing pile threatening to bury the Yankees. Only this time, it was the smiling Mets holding the shovel.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
