The subtleties behind beating Houston Astros ace Gerrit Cole

Teams have to rely on precision tactics to defeat a pitcher like Houston Astros ace Gerrit Cole. Tampa Bay failed to implement most of them on Saturday.

How do you defeat a genuine ace?

The Tampa Bay Rays confronted that question Saturday night when they ran up against Gerrit Cole, Houston’s (other) 20-game winner. In 33 starts, Cole posted a league-leading 2,50 ERA this season, striking out a league-leading 326 opponents and limiting those opponents to two runs or fewer in 26 of his appearances.

Cole hasn’t been defeated since mid-May.

Defeating a pitcher working that consistently and that exceptionally requires some adjustments to a normal game plan. You can’t just go out there and try to mash with the Houston Astros; that’s the approach that got Cole to 20-5 in the first place.

And victory was especially critical to the Rays since they had already lost the first game of their best-of-five American League Division Series 6-0 to Cole’s running-mate, Justin Verlander. Indeed, Cole sent the Rays tumbling to within one game of elimination Saturday when he went seven and two-thirds innings of shutout ball in Houston’s 3-1 victory.

How can an underdog – and probably less-talented — team like the Rays even hope to compete against a pitcher of Cole’s dominance in a must-win game? To have a chance, that team has to employ certain strategic approaches that are not necessarily common in today’s game. Because it’s unlikely that Cole is going to give any opponent more than a handful of opportunities to make headway against him or his Astros, those approaches emphasize efficiency at the expense of the more standard “slash and burn” approach to offense that is generally popular in the modern game.

Assessing how well the Rays did in utilizing these strategies might provide an understanding of where they fell short against Cole.

Beating Houston Astros Ace Gerrit Cole

Run up his pitch count

If the Rays were facing the real Gerrit Cole and not a one-night cheap imitation, the next best point of attack was to try to exhaust him. That involved running up his pitch count as quickly as possible on the theory that Houston Astros manager A.J. Hinch would not permit one of his aces to risk potential injury or fatigue by staying in the game more than 100 pitches or thereabouts.

It’s a major challenge for two reasons. By modern standards, Cole has a relatively high pitch threshold…he’s thrown 112 pitches as recently as late August, and he works efficiently, never walking more than three batters all season.

That 20-pitch first inning – encompassing about one-fifth of a normal modern start – was a good basis to hope that the Rays might be able to get into Houston’s softer bullpen at a relatively early moment. But the plan than required waiting Cole out more.

And that was something the Rays appeared constitutionally unable to bring themselves to do. As early as the second inning, all three Rays batters – Avisail Garcia, Brandon Lowe, and Travis d’Arnaud – swung at first strikes that missed the strike zone. Cole escaped the inning on just 10 pitches.

As the game wore on, Tampa Bay did a better job of trying to make Cole work. From the third inning through Cole’s removal with two out in the eighth, he faced 19 batters, 12 of whom took the first pitch, eight for a ball.

Long-term, of course, the problem with this strategy is that it requires the pitcher’s cooperation in missing the strike zone. That’s not Cole’s thing. He would eventually deliver a season-high 118 pitches, but 70 percent would be strikes, allowing him to last those seven and two-thirds innings.

By the time he left, the Astros led 3-0. Grade: D.

Beating Houston Astros Ace Gerrit Cole

Summon the ghost of Gene Mauch

Those of a certain age will recall Mauch as the ancient manager who favored small-ball, one-run strategies. Such strategies – the bunt, the steal, the hit, and run – are widely viewed as passé in an era when teams average two home runs per game.

The problem is that Gerrit Cole doesn’t do home runs. He only allowed two or more in a game six times all season. That reality forces teams to go back to school – old school – to defeat him.

Taking pitches to reach base is part of that strategy. But as noted earlier, Cole allows walks almost as infrequently as he allows homers. He issued just 48 of them all season; that’s about two per game.

To beat a pitcher who doesn’t beat himself requires sort of a Mauchian approach, although it would be even more helpful if that approach doesn’t burnouts in the process. So we’ll eschew consideration of sacrifices as an option and consider instead bunts for a base hit and putting runners in motion. In short, we’ll take anything that moves a runner farther along the basepath than he might normally have been expected to advance by standard processes.

But Cole only permitted the Rays a total of a half dozen bases Saturday night, not a single one of which fit the category we’re looking for. And three of those came from the final two batters he faced before being lifted in the eighth: Kevin Kiermaier, who doubled, and Willy Adames, who walked.

There were a few fleeting windows of opportunity for Tampa Bay to create Mauchian base advances. But no sooner did one arise than the Rays themselves sabotaged their own prospects.

Kiermaier might have had one of those to start the third inning. By that point, Cole had established that he had brought his ‘A’ game, ensuring that run-scoring opportunities would have to be manufactured. A career .249 hitter with not much power, Kiermaier is, however, a competent bat handler; he fanned just 21 percent of the time in 2019, below the league average.

As a left-handed hitter with above-average speed, he is, then, a prime candidate to try to reach base with a bunt. But Kiermaier never gave it a thought. He swung through a high first-pitch four-seam fastball, and three pitches later lifted a lazy fly ball to center field that is an out 100 percent of the time.

Given that all but one of their base-runners against Cole reached when two were already out, the Rays had few additional opportunities to make much happen. But they did have one, and they figuratively tripped over their own feet screwing it up.

Adames led off the sixth inning with a line single. In a 1-0 game, he carried the potential tying run and Rays manager Kevin Cash tried to make something of the chance.  With a 3-2 count on Yandy Diaz, Cash put Adames in motion.

He should have made it without a play because the 3-2 pitch was low and outside, well beyond either the confines of the strike zone or Diaz’s reach. But Diaz – presumably impatient to hit a two-run home run — fished for it anyway and fanned. Houston Astros catcher Martin Maldonado easily threw Adames out at second base, and four pitches later Austin Meadows ended the inning with another easy fly ball. Grade: F.

Beating Houston Astros Ace Gerrit Cole

Cole’s good enough; don’t help him

Diaz’s critical flailing whiff underscored one other dictum when trying to defeat an ace. Do not assist in your own downfall. That generally means eliminating baserunning blunders, and even more importantly it means swinging only at good pitches. In that one sixth inning instant, the Rays violated both dicta.

All night, they ran afoul of it far more frequently in subtle yet problematic ways. Nearly half of the pitches Gerrit Cole threw that were either swung at and missed or put in play were actually outside the strike zone. Only one of those – Adames’ sixth-inning single – resulted in a baserunner. Ten of the 23 men Cole retired he set down thanks to a pitch that should not have been a strike.

The Rays’ batting average against Cole when swinging at non-strikes? It was .091. When they stayed in the strike zone, they hardly roughed Cole up (.214) but at least they had a marginal chance.

In the field, Tampa Bay also hurt its own cause. Yuli Gurriel led off the Houston sixth with a ground ball in the hole that shortstop Adames fielded, bobbled, recovered and then threw low to first for an error.

Had the play been made as it should have, Houston might possibly still have scored in that inning because Carlos Correa followed with a double and Martin Maldonado dropped a one-out base hit into short right. Absent the error, that would have been a two-out single, giving Correa a running start from second. But the error ensured the additional run. Grade: F.

Beating Houston Astros Ace Gerrit Cole

Gimme a break … or a three-run homer

When you’re trying to beat a pitcher of Gerrit Cole’s caliber, a bit of good fortune is always handy. The Rays got such a break in the seventh inning, but they failed to take advantage of it.

With Gurriel on first thanks to Adames’ error, Correa rocketed a double down the line. Absent an act of God, the ball would have rolled into the corner, allowing Gurriel to score.

That’s when the ballboy intervened. The young Houston Astros employee assigned to sit down the line, field foul balls and dispense with them, was unable to move his stool out of the way in time to avoid deflecting Correa’s hit, which rolled conveniently to Meadows. He was able to hold Gurriel at third base.

Alas, that intervention had only a temporary impact. As previously noted, Maldonado followed with a base hit of his own that ensured Gurriel’s safe passage home with the second run.

Failing all else, the modern solution of last resort is always the three-run home run. But facing Cole affords few opportunities for such sudden advances, and the Rays failed to take advantage of the only one they got.

In fact, Tampa Bay hitters never put a ball in play against Cole all night at a moment when there was a Rays baserunner.

Their opportunities to do so were sufficiently limited that they can be recounted in full here. In the first, Choi fanned with Pham at first. In the fifth, Kiermaier followed d’Arnaud’s two-out single by striking out. In the sixth, Diaz struck out into that double play. Finally, in the eighth, Adames followed Kiermaier’s double by walking, an event that prompted Cole’s removal.

When Cole left, Diaz faced Roberto Osuna for the first time in a situation when a three-run home run was even a mathematical possibility. He whiffed to end the inning. Grade: F

Beating Houston Astros Ace Gerrit Cole

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Beating Gerrit Cole requires that teams adapt their normal strategies, emphasizing getting ahead with small-ball strategies, maximizing their rare chances to move once on bases, swinging only at good pitches while laying off the bad ones, and extracting early effort out of Cole in the hope of weakening him over the long haul.

The Rays generally failed at most of these endeavors. That’s probably not a surprise since only a handful of contemporary teams emphasize the individual discipline required to actually implement those strategies.

On Saturday night, Tampa only once tried to ‘manufacture’ a scoring opportunity, and that one effort blew up in the Rays’ faces thanks to an absence of plate discipline. They gave Cole too much opportunity to retire them outside the strike zone, and he took full advantage of that opportunity.

And on the rare occasions when the Rays managed to advance a runner onto the bases, their batters were utterly unable even to make contact, much less move that runner along.

When an underdog fails to execute in small ways against one of the game’s elite pitchers, it will be very difficult for that underdog to emerge with a victory. The Rays failed to execute the small things. That’s hardly the only reason they lost Saturday – Cole’s inherent skill had the predominance to do with the outcome.

But that failure to execute killed whatever small chance remained to beat an elite pitcher on an elite night.