Any good feeling the Yankees might have earned over the previous week-plus of solid baseball quickly evaporated over the weekend in Boston.
The Yankees were rocked 9-2 on Sunday afternoon by the Boston Red Sox, putting the final putrid finishing touches of yet another weekend sweep suffered by New York.
Questions about Gerrit Cole’s legitimacy as one of the top pitchers in baseball are only going to plummet after this.
The Yankees’ ace was one of the more prominent names accused of using illegal substances to get an unfair advantage on his pitches — and since Major League Baseball’s crackdown on the use of foreign substances, that suspicion is only going to grow.
Especially after Sunday afternoon’s outing.
Cole was tagged for six runs, five earned, on eight hits — three of them home runs — to go with six strikeouts and two walks in a Yankees.
His worst outing of the season was also tied for his shortest, going just five innings before he was relieved by Luis Cessa in the sixth with the Yankees trailing 6-0.
They were down instantaneously when Cole’s first pitch of the afternoon was seared out of Fenway Park and over the green monster by Enrique Hernandez.
After a double by Alex Verdugo and a walk of J.D. Martinez, Rafael Devers made it a home-run party when he launched his 19th of the season over the right-center field wall to make it 4-0 after one.
Martinez got to Cole again leading off the third inning when he went dead-center for a solo shot, his 15th of the season.
The very next batter saw Gleyber Torres’ throwing error allow Xander Bogaerts to advance to second base on what would have been an infield single. He scored later in the frame on a Christian Vazquez sacrifice fly.
The Yankees finally got on the board in the sixth inning when Aaron Judge assaulted the green monster with a laser of a 17th home run of the season — a two-run shot to pull New York within four.
Devers got one of those back for Boston as his big day continued with an RBI single in the seventh inning for his fourth RBI of the day.
In the eighth, Vazquez got the Red Sox’s eighth with a lead-off solo home run off Brooks Kriske before Hernandez made it 9-2 with a check-swing RBI double.
