The subtleties behind beating Houston Astros ace Gerrit Cole

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.