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.