For six innings on Friday night at Yankee Stadium, this looked like the Cole start Yankees fans have been begging for all year. He was carving through a stacked Dodgers lineup, and the energy around the building matched it — this was LA's first trip to the Bronx since winning the 2024 World Series, so there was extra juice on both sides.
Gerrit Fucking Cole
The Yankees actually had a hitting highlight of their own before things went sideways, with Dominguez getting credit for busting it down the line on a well-struck ball earlier in the game. It was the kind of scrappy, do-everything play that's supposed to set the tone for a night like this.
Great hustle from Dominguez after a nice piece of hitting. Did it all there
Then came the 7th. With Cole sitting at 103 pitches and still in the game, Max Muncy worked a seven-pitch battle, fouling off three straight before turning on a hanging 2-2 slider and depositing it into the second deck in right field for a two-run homer. It flipped a 1-0 Yankees lead into a 2-1 Dodgers advantage that would hold up as the final score, according to reports on the game. Aaron Boone's decision to let Cole face Muncy that deep into the outing is going to get picked apart, though the pitcher himself owned the moment — he just didn't execute the putaway pitch.
MAXIMUM MUNCY
If the homer was the dagger, the baserunning in the 8th was the salt in the wound. Trent Grisham was on base when a ball was rocketed into the gap — the kind of extra-base hit that should score a runner from second standing up. Instead, Grisham was caught looking back at the play mid-stride instead of running full speed, and the Dodgers turned in a relay and tag at the plate to snuff out the rally entirely.
Can’t draw up a relay better than this
The postgame reaction zeroed in on Grisham hard, and it wasn't subtle — jogging out of the box and peeking at the outfield on a ball crushed into the gap is the kind of mental lapse that costs games, not just innings. Whether the blame lands on Grisham himself or third base coach for a bad send, the larger diagnosis was the same: a lineup that's needed a true table-setter with speed at the top for a while now, and offense that's been a problem well beyond one bad read on the bases.
Cole's final line will get lost in the noise, but a start that strong going to waste is exactly the kind of loss that stings more in July than it would in April — a series opener the Yankees were built to win, undone by one pitch and one jog instead of a sprint.