One pitch sinks Gerrit Cole and Yankees in tough loss to Dodgers that snaps four-game win streak

Gerrit Cole had the magic words, or look, to convince Aaron Boone to leave him in the game during a mound visit in the seventh inning Friday night. 

But that is just about where his sorcery ran out. 

With the tying run on first and no outs, Cole remained in the game to face Max Muncy and on his season-high 103rd pitch of the night left a slider over the heart of the plate that ended up in the second deck in right field. 

Muncy’s two-run shot off Cole flipped the game and dealt the Yankees a crushing 2-1 loss to the Dodgers in front of a sold-out crowd of 46,450 in The Bronx, snapping the four-game winning streak with which they finished the first half. 

“Obviously in hindsight, I probably should have grabbed him there,” Boone said. “That’s on me. … I said, ‘You got one more in you?’ [He said], ‘Yeah.’ Sometimes you got to take it out of their hands.” 

The Yankees (54-43), continuing life without Aaron Judge for the foreseeable future after his reimaging during the All-Star break did not show enough healing to allow him to start baseball activities, could not provide enough run support to make Cole’s only mistake of the night sting less. They mustered just one run against Roki Sasaki and the Dodgers bullpen, coming in the fourth inning when Jasson Domínguez scored on a passed ball. 

They had a chance to tie it in the eighth inning, but Trent Grisham was thrown out at the plate trying to score from first base on Ben Rice’s double with an aggressive send from third-base coach Luis Rojas. Grisham did not immediately bust it from first base, which came back to cost him as the Dodgers (62-36) made the relay from center fielder Andy Pages to shortstop Mookie Betts, who backed up an overthrow to second base and made a throw on the run to catcher Dalton Rushing. 

“You’ve got to push the envelope a little bit with one out,” Boone said. “I thought it was a decisive decision where he was probably holding him but read the throw properly. … You’d hate to leave that run on the table with the guy running off-balance. He made a play. But I don’t have an issue with the send.” 

With the Red Sox sweeping a doubleheader against the Rays on Friday, the Yankees had a chance to pick up a game and a half in the division, but settled for just a half-game, now trailing the Rays by 2 ¹/₂ games for first place. 

Cole had been dominant for six shutout innings before issuing his first walk of the night to Betts to lead off the seventh. Boone had lefty Brent Headrick ready in the bullpen, but after a brief chat with Cole on the mound, decided to leave him in against the left-handed hitting Muncy. 

Cole quickly got ahead 0-2 and then thought he had strike three on a slider that appeared to clip the top corner of the zone, but was called a ball and Austin Wells did not use the Yankees’ remaining challenge. 

“My mindset is I can always make another pitch,” said Cole, who struck out eight. “It’s just one more pitch. You can figure out how to make one more.” 

Three pitches later, though, another slider caught too much of the plate and Muncy clobbered it 416 feet to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 Dodgers lead. 

“I looked at the pitch, it’s not where I wanted it,” Cole said. “But I looked at the swing, it was pretty excellent. It just stinks.” 

In the Dodgers’ first trip to Yankee Stadium since winning the World Series here in 2024 — Cole, of course, was on the mound for the fateful Game 5 in his last start before undergoing Tommy John surgery — they threw three lefty relievers after Sasaki lit up the radar gun for 5 ²/₃ innings. 

In the fourth inning, Domínguez laced a double to the gap, took third on the play as Pages bobbled the ball on the warning track and then scored on Sasaki’s forkball that got past Rushing for the 1-0 lead. 

But that was all they could get. 

“[Sasaki] has got offspeed pitches with some good depth to them and velo separation when he’s got a 100-plus mile an hour fastball in his back pocket,” Rice said. “He was getting some early contact, getting some miss, just keeping us off-balance.”