Boston Drops Four First-Inning Runs, Buries Cole and Yankees
Masataka Yoshida and Anthony Seigler hit back-to-back home runs, and Boston never looked back, handing Gerrit Cole a 4-1 loss on Saturday. The Red Sox scored all four of their runs before New York got on the board, turning this one into a damage-control exercise for the Yankees almost immediately.
The story of the night was how fast Boston buried Cole. Yoshida led things off by taking him deep to right center — 386 feet — to make it 1-0. Seigler followed with a 339-foot shot to left, and just like that it was 2-0 before Cole could exhale. The knockout blow came when Contreras doubled to center, scoring both Rafaela and Yoshida to push it to 4-0. That double swung the win probability from 78% to 90% in Boston's favor, and at that point the game had a foregone-conclusion feel to it. Cole finished with 5.1 innings pitched, allowing 7 hits and 4 earned runs against 5 strikeouts — not the outing a team needs when it's already dealing with roster attrition. The Yankees placed infielder Ryan McMahon on the 10-day IL earlier this week with a throat infection, a reminder that New York has been navigating some depth issues lately.
Jake Bennett was the quiet beneficiary of all that early run support. He went 6.1 innings, surrendering just 3 hits and 1 earned run while walking 2 and striking out 3. It wasn't a dominant performance on paper, but it was efficient enough — Bennett gave Boston exactly what it needed after the offense did the heavy lifting. Aroldis Chapman closed things out with a clean inning, allowing no hits and striking out one in 1.0 IP.
New York's lone bright spot was Max Schuemann, who launched a 412-foot shot to center in the fifth inning to account for the Yankees' only run. It was a legitimate blast, but it amounted to cosmetic damage on a night when the deficit was already insurmountable. Amed Rosario went 1-for-4 and Brent Headrick was sharp in relief — 1.0 IP, no hits, no runs, 3 strikeouts — but the Yankees simply ran out of game. Boston's offense looks like a unit that can pile on in bunches: three different players homered, Contreras drove in two with a single swing, and Rafaela reached base twice in four at-bats. When a lineup does that kind of damage in the early innings against a pitcher of Cole's caliber, the final score tends to take care of itself.