It’s a word you will never, ever hear a baseball person say: passive. A hitter who walks a lot is disciplined, selective or patient. Never passive. So what do you call it when a reigning Cy Young Award winner backs out of a matchup with the other team’s best hitter?
It’s bold to say that something so obviously passive was, in fact, aggressive. But that’s how the Yankees described Gerrit Cole’s decision to intentionally walk Boston’s Rafael Devers with one out and the bases empty in the fourth inning on Saturday at Yankee Stadium.
“Working through preparation this week with Gerrit,” Manager Aaron Boone said, after a truly karmic 7-1 loss to the rightly offended Red Sox, “we were gonna be a little more aggressive in some situations.”
Aggressive would mean going after Devers, wouldn’t it?
Well, actually — no. Not on Saturday, anyway, when the Yankees tried to frame the intentional walk as an aggressive deployment of a strategy — the strategy being to completely opt out of facing Devers. Cole has given up eight homers to Devers, twice as many as he’s allowed to any other hitter. But he has also struck him out 15 times.
In the first inning, Cole had hit Devers, who was erased on a double play. He had faced the minimum after retiring Jarren Duran on a flyout to start the fourth inning, then put the doomed strategy into action. Aggressively.
“We were in the tunnel before the inning and I discussed that if Duran was retired, were we going to stick to aggressively intentionally walk him?” Cole said. “And that was the plan. And then during the inning, I looked to the dugout and stuck with the plan. If I make pitches after that and I continue to execute at a high level, you know, then the plan works. But evidently the plan didn’t work.”
Gerrit Cole Intentionally Walking Devers…
And Devers’ reaction. pic.twitter.com/0FZG164uzn
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) September 14, 2024
You might call this more of a concepts-of-a-plan situation than an actual plan. When Cole coolly held up four fingers and pointed Devers toward first base, catcher Austin Wells was surprised.
“I didn’t know if we were just kidding,” Wells said, and it’s startling that the catcher was somehow not made aware of how the Yankees planned to handle Boston’s marquee hitter.
Devers has been slumping lately (he was 9-for-53 in his past 14 games before Saturday as he plays through shoulder trouble) but he is still dangerous. There are no safe zones in attacking Devers, one of the game’s best bad-ball hitters. Cole explained that the bullpen was thin and he wanted to be economical.
In other words, if he was going to pitch around Devers anyway, it made sense to walk him, save a few pitches, and go after the middle of the order: Tyler O’Neill, Masataka Yoshida and Wilyer Abreu.
But they all capitalized, following the lead of Devers, who stole second after the walk and sparked a three-run rally. Four more runs followed in the fifth off Cole, who allowed 10 of his last 12 hitters to reach base, starting with the fateful walk.
“I think it gave them momentum,” Wells said. “It fired them up. Teams use whatever they can to get going. I definitely feel like it got them going.”
Wilyer adding on! pic.twitter.com/hD3UkHA7AU
— Red Sox (@RedSox) September 14, 2024
To the Red Sox, the walk showed that Cole wanted no part of Devers and therefore must have hit him intentionally in the first inning. (He had no place to put Devers in their third encounter, with the bases loaded in the fifth, when Devers singled in two runs.)
Cole insisted he did not hit Devers on purpose — and, euphemisms aside, he acknowledged he’d messed up with the intentional walk.
“Clearly that was a mistake. I think I bought into the plan going into it, but afterwards it was the wrong move.”
He added: “Look, I’m just trying to win the game. I’m trying to get behind whatever we believe is the best strategy to win the game. I mean, he’s cost us games in the past.”
Boone, the players’ manager that he is, tried to share the blame with Cole. What he could have done was wave off the intentional walk, then make a mound visit to give Cole — and Wells — a reset. He let Cole make the call and regretted it.
“I think Gerrit felt convicted at that moment, like: ‘Let’s go with this,’” Boone said. “But once we scored the run, I should have been more demanding like, ‘No, let’s get after it right now.’”
Blame Cole, Boone and pitching coach Matt Blake for overthinking this. It seems counterintuitive to put doubt in the pitcher’s mind, doesn’t it? Cole should be planning for how to get Devers out, not when to “aggressively” walk him.
This isn’t some nervous September call-up. This is Cole, the MLB leader in victories and strikeouts since 2017. As good as Devers is, Cole gave him way too much credit. He showed that Devers is in his head.
“Obviously, Raffy’s had some success against him,” Boone said. “It’s something that he’s also got to get through, too, like making sure he understands that, ‘The next 40 or 50 at-bats in my career against him, I might have massive success because I’m Gerrit Cole.’ But there’s a psychological component to all that.”
There is, and the whole thing — from the walk to the way the Red Sox completely seized control from then on — makes you wonder if Cole lacks confidence. He is famously durable, but his season began with elbow inflammation, which kept him out of action until mid-June.
Overall, Cole is 6-5 with a 3.97 ERA and has not thrown a pitch beyond the sixth inning in any of his 15 starts. His biggest starts will come next month, as they always do for the Yankees, and you hope that by then he’ll be more aggressive — for real.
(Photo: Frank Franklin II / Associated Press)
