KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Gerrit Cole and his new right elbow will, in fact, allow a run at some point.
It just has not happened yet through his first two starts back in the big leagues after Tommy John surgery.
Cole looked very much like his vintage self Wednesday night in a dominant showing against the Royals, striking out 10 across 6 ²/₃ scoreless innings to help the Yankees finish a sweep with a 7-0 win at Kauffman Stadium.
“Feel like maybe the first game was a little appetizer and that was the main course right there,” manager Aaron Boone said. “That was surgical.”
The 35-year-old right-hander scattered just four hits and did not walk a batter while pounding the strike zone all night. After tossing six scoreless innings against the Rays on Friday in his season debut, Cole’s toughest opponent Wednesday was once again his pitch count, capped at 79 pitches as the Yankees continue to build him back up carefully.
But Cole made the most of those pitches, dialing his fastball up to 98 mph for a called strikeout in the fifth inning on a night when his command was on point.
“I think it’s coming along,” an understated Cole said in the visiting clubhouse, shortly after his warmup song, “Lean Back,” had finished blaring over the speakers as the Yankees headed into an off day on a high note. “There’s still some stuff to work on, absolutely, going forward. But with what we had tonight, I thought we used it really well.”
Cole and the Yankees (34-22) have acknowledged there will be some inevitable bumps in the road as the former Cy Young winner settles back into pitching every five or six days. But until then, he has only offered a tantalizing preview of how he might elevate an already strong rotation.
“He’s one of the greatest to ever do it, and you see it with starts like this, where you come back from a major surgery and it looks like he hasn’t even skipped a beat,” said Aaron Judge, who threw a runner out at the plate in the third inning to keep the shutout intact.
Paul Goldschmidt, Ben Rice and Ryan McMahon provided most of the offense, each recording a pair of hits and combining to drive in six runs, as the Yankees won their 14th straight game against the Royals (22-34) — including outscoring them 50-10 in the now-complete season series.
Rice got the Yankees on the board in the fourth inning with an RBI triple and then scored on Judge’s sacrifice fly.
The slugging first baseman later added a two-run single in the seventh before McMahon crushed a two-run shot in the eighth.
Cole, meanwhile, had only two strikeouts in his season debut, but matched that in the first inning alone Wednesday and then kept piling on. Even more encouraging was that after walking three batters against the Rays, Cole had only two three-ball counts all night Wednesday.
The first came in the fourth inning when he fell behind 3-0 to Bobby Witt Jr., who had the green light and popped out to second base.
The other came against the final batter he faced, Carter Jensen, who drew a full count with one out and one on in the seventh inning before also popping out.
“I think when I first started throwing [in the rehab process], and I was able to get through the four-seam better than I had been in the previous few years, that was obviously an encouraging sign,” Cole said. “Outside of that, it’s two games, man, small sample. There’s still stuff to improve.”
But Wednesday offered the Yankees another chance to dream on what their rotation might be capable of doing the rest of the way.
Cole, Cam Schlittler and Will Warren combined to give up just three runs across 18 ²/₃ innings in this series.
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They have Carlos Rodón and a surging Ryan Weathers lined up to start the first two games against the Athletics this weekend, and hope to add Max Fried back into the mix at some point this summer.
And if Cole continues to look like this?
“I just thought we were watching excellence,” Boone said. “I don’t want to overstate it or understate it. It was just an excellent, efficient, surgical outing where I thought he had a little bit of everything going.”
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