So tonight the Yankees begin their 2020 playoff journey. And while you're never fond of branding one game essential, this is as close to must-win as the Bombers will get for a series opener when they face the Cleveland Indians. The first team to win two games moves on.
It's so vital that both teams are trotting out their aces. In the eye-popping bargain department, Shane Bieber, who has won 34 MLB games in his career, will face Gerrit Cole, who has all kinds of patches and props on his lapels, and has notched over 100 big-league wins.
Bieber made $559,000 last year, and his pay bumped up to $623,000 this year. For that price the Indians ace led the sport with eight wins, a 1.63 ERA, and 122 strikeouts - the AL pitching equivalent of the Triple Crown. By Contrast, Cole - who had a nice year, going 7-3 with a 2.84 ERA and 94 strikeouts in 73 innings - made over $1 million per start.
Bieber also allowed an absurd 0.8 home runs per nine inning, sports a microscopic 0.866 WHIP, and fanned 41.1 percent of the batters he faced. He also laps Cole in WAR, at 3.2 to 1.5.
Of course, none of that will matter if the Yanks topple Cleveland tonight. Cole was bought and brought to the Bronx precisely for this. Not only must he lead a rotation best described during the regular season as leaky, he must also find his Beast Mode button within the next few hours. He seemed to locate it this month, though – August was ugly for Cole (4.19 ERA) but he's been every inch an ace in September, allowing three earned runs in four starts, and just 14 hits in 27 total innings with a pristine 1.00 ERA.
For his career in the postseason, Cole has a more modest 6-4 record with a 3.70 ERA. But the Bombers are banking on the Cole from 2019, the one who went 4-1 with a 1.72 ERA and 0.87 WHIP in leading the Astros to the Fall Classic. If the recent past is prologue, then the Yanks should get a dominant Cole tonight.
They'd better. While the Indians can trot out two more pitchers with sub-3.00 ERAs, the Yankees will have Cole, and then Masahiro Tanaka, and then pray. Their pseudo-ace, Luis Severino, is out for the year, and James Paxton, who finished the 2019 season with an 11-0 record, is injured and not on the roster. So, it will be some soup of JA Happ and Deivi Garcia, with Garcia's ERA a nose hair under 5.00.
But this is what aces do. They snap losing streaks, lead rotations, and set tones. So many pitchers, from former Yankee David Cone to Ron Darling, the former pitcher and marvelous TV analyst for the Mets, talk about how one performance from a pitcher can spark a competition inside the rotation, and inspire an entire ball club. So it must be with Gerrit Cole, who must toss at least seven innings of bat-cracking gas.
You may recall a few moons ago, the Yankees played the Angels in the ALDS, and they compared the collective experience of both squads. The Yankees had like 6,000 years of playoff history, and the closest the Angels had to real playoff time was manager Mike Scoscia's years with the Dodgers in the 1980s. The Angels were surely cringing in the hulking shadow of Aura, Mystique, Yankee Stadium, and Americana. Then they whipped the Yankees, 3-1, and went on to win the 2002 World Series.
The Yankees don't have that kind of edge on anyone anymore. They just went their first full decade sans a World Series appearance since they bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox. But they've been getting tantalizingly, if not agonizingly, close the last few years. If they want this one to be different, they need Game 1 tonight, their old formula with their new ace.
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel