Yankees 5, Braves 4, and the Old-Timers on hand got to watch Gerrit Cole write himself into the same record book most of them are already in.
Cole struck out Matt Olson twice on Saturday, and the second one was the one that mattered -- his 1,000th strikeout as a Yankee, making him the fastest player in franchise history to get there. Seven innings, two runs, nine punchouts, zero walks. That's the kind of start that makes an Old-Timers' Day feel like it was scheduled on purpose.
But this one needed more than Cole. It needed Spencer Jones twice, a Chris Sale meltdown, and a closer who made it more interesting than he needed to.
The turning point
Down 2-1 in the fifth, Jones ripped a triple to center off Sale with nobody out, scoring George Lombard Jr. (who'd walked to lead off the inning) to tie it. That was the biggest swing of the game by win probability, and it wasn't close.
Then it got weird. With Austin Wells at the plate, Sale balked, and Jones walked home from third to make it 3-2. Braves manager Walt Weiss lost his mind about the call, and HP umpire Dan Merzel tossed him for it (fair or not, arguing a balk call is a losing battle -- nobody's ever won that one). Those two runs in the fifth pushed Sale to three earned on the day, and the Braves never quite recovered.
Star of the game: Cole gets to 1,000
Cole's line speaks for itself, but the number behind it is what makes it a story: 139 games to reach 1,000 strikeouts in pinstripes, the fastest anyone's ever done it for this franchise. He's in his 14th start back from Tommy John surgery and sporting a 2.27 ERA over his last five outings, which is not what "coming back from elbow surgery" is supposed to look like this cleanly.
Beat writers around the league jumped on the milestone fast.
That's the kind of number that sits quietly next to the box score until someone points it out, and then you can't stop thinking about it.
The rest of the damage
Jones wasn't done after the triple -- he'd already driven in the Yankees' first run back in the second with an RBI single. Two-for-three, two RBI, the two biggest plays of the game. Quietly the best player on the field not named Cole.
Lombard Jr. added a solo shot in the seventh, his second career homer in his fourth career game (the timeline on that is absurd), and it came against the organization his father broke into the league with back in 1998. Ronald Acuña Jr. answered with a solo homer of his own in the eighth to make it a one-run game again, and then Ben Rice put it back to two with a 431-foot blast to center -- his 32nd of the season. Three homers in three half-innings. Somebody tell the Stadium radar gun operator to take a break.
David Bednar came on for the ninth and made it more dramatic than it needed to be, letting Dominic Smith single home a run before closing it out for the save. The tying run was standing on first when Drake Baldwin lined out to right to end it. Bednar got the last out anyway.
Not a bad way to spend Old-Timers' Day
Mo, Tino, Bernie, Pettitte, O'Neill, Guidry, Matsui -- half of Monument Park was in the building to watch a rookie with two career homers and a starter chasing down franchise history on the same afternoon. That's a pretty good split-screen for a franchise that likes to talk about connecting eras.
Yankees take the series 2-0 with a rubber game tomorrow, and they've won two straight after Friday's extra-inning walk-off. Four back of the Rays, and they're not walking away from this stretch quietly.
Jimmy writes the Bronx Pinstripes game recap after every Yankees game. Beat-reporter pacing, fan's heartbeat. He calls opposing players by last name and has no patience for dead-air innings.
