The Mets didn’t just clinch this edition of the Subway Series with Sunday’s 10-5 Game 1 beatdown in the Bronx.
They have unofficially put a fork in the Yankees’ season.
On July 4th. George Steinbrenner’s birthday.
Cooked. Done. Finished. Scraped off the grill and tossed in the garbage can.
How satisfying for the Flushing Nine and their newly emboldened fan base. How utterly miserable for the venerable Yankees, who lately have been transformed into pinstriped bowling pins, getting smashed by the Red Sox at Fenway Park and then humiliated by the Mets.
The Yankees suffered their two worst losses of the season in the span of five days (remember Wednesday’s rain-soaked meltdown?) and there’s no reason to believe the bottom has been reached. Why should anyone think a rebound is right around the corner?
In Game 1 of Sunday’s split-doubleheader, Gerrit Cole spit up a 4-1 lead and couldn’t finish the fourth inning, his shortest outing in five years. Aaron Boone’s faith is so eroded in his $324-million ace that he didn’t trust him to get two more outs with Mets on the bases. And once the manager took the ball, Cole was loudly booed on his slow walk to the dugout.
“It is what it is,” Cole said. “You sign up for it when you come here. It’s not a good feeling and you just try to pitch well enough so that doesn’t happen.”
Can Cole even do that anymore? Since June 3, with reports intensifying about the sticky-stuff crackdown and minor-league pitchers getting suspended, Cole is 2-3 with a 5.24 ERA in those six starts. That’s not even mediocre. And no way do the Yankees climb off the mat with Cole scuffling like a middle-of-the-rotation piece.
But wait — there’s more. Chapman also remains a mess, and Boone was so confident in his crumbling closer that he stuck with him for three whole batters in the seventh inning — none of which he retired — before fetching him, too. Just like Cole.
Chapman teed up a terrible slider to Pete Alonso, who hammered it into the Mets’ bullpen to tie the score at 5, then drilled Michael Conforto in the back with a 100-mph fastball. It wasn’t on purpose — Chapman has no clue where his pitches are going these days — and a walk to Jeff McNeil put him out of his misery.
For now, anyway. If Boone knows what’s good for him, we shouldn’t see Chapman in the closer’s role for a while. Over his last nine appearances, a total of 5 2/3 innings, Chapman has been tagged for 14 earned runs, jumping his ERA from 0.39 to 4.71, hardly All-Star quality, despite him officially getting the nod between Sunday’s games.
Chapman shouldn’t have been handed the ball in that situation, either. Boone could have stuck with the reliable Chad Green, who threw only two pitches to protect the 5-4 lead in the sixth, but the manager later said he needed to save him for the nightcap.
That’s ridiculous. The Yankees are desperate, their season on the brink, and Boone had to go full throttle to win the game in hand. There has been plenty of excuse-making for Boone with the Yankees circling the drain, but he needs to wear this one. And an already difficult task reviving this dead-team-walking just got 10 times harder with Cole and Chapman looking average and atrocious, respectively.
“We can’t get to where we want to go without those two guys, obviously,” Boone said. “Those two guys are critical to what we do.”
What the Yankees do now is roll over. A lot. Sunday’s early afternoon kneecapping by the Mets was their seventh loss in eight games and it dropped them to .500 (41-41) at the latest point of a season since they were 56-56 in August 2016.
And the Mets? They’re the polar (bear) opposite of their Bronx buddies, a grinding group with building momentum and a roster getting healthier by the day. The Mets entered the Subway Series with the second-worst scoring offense in the sport, averaging 3.57 runs, but they racked up 18 in two games against the Yankees since the return of on-base machine Brandon Nimmo.
“It was just such a great collective effort,” Alonso said after Sunday’s opener. “We just didn’t back down from a challenge, from the first to last pitch of the game. And that’s who we are. That’s our identity. Regardless of what’s in front of us, we never back down. We’re always going full bore right at you and we want to continue to play like that.”
That’s why the Mets have been atop the NL East for 73 days, the longest stretch of any team in the majors, and will leave the Bronx with their crosstown rivals in even worse shape then when they arrived.
“Another awful loss,” Boone said. “There’s no other way to put it.”
Just add it to the growing pile threatening to the bury the Yankees. Only this time the smiling Mets were holding the shovel.
