Gerrit Cole’s wild-card disaster sparks troubling Yankees question

BOSTON — Well, that’s gonna leave a mark.

What an absolutely brutal way for Gerrit Cole to end his season. The Yankees’ season.

And now among the many clouds that will hover over Major League Baseball’s most storied franchise until next October, you can add this one: Can Cole still be counted on to justify his huge contract and lead the Yankees all the way back to the Canyon of Heroes?

The 2021 Yankees’ roller-coaster ride ended with a crash Tuesday night, the team falling meekly to the Red Sox, 6-2, in the American League wild-card game at Fenway Park, their historic rivals advancing to the AL Division Series against the Rays as Cole picked up only six outs while facing 12 batters, a sorry performance in such a big game set to the tune of Red Sox fans taunting, “Gerrrrrr-iiiit!” as he gave up three runs on four hits, including a pair of homers, and two walks.

“Sick to my stomach,” Cole said, diagnosing his postgame malaise far more specifically than his in-game failures.

For the Bosox to prevail despite treating this year as a de facto rebuild, for the rival Rays to skip right past this nail-biter despite spending just over one-third of the Yankees’ payroll, for the Yankees to not earn themselves a single postseason home game … it constitutes many mouthfuls of bitterness for the Yankees and their demanding fan base, now having clocked 12 seasons without a World Series visit, to swallow.

Ironically, manager-on-the-griddle Aaron Boone’s best move of the night probably came in lifting Cole when he did, two on and no outs in the third and three runs already in, and going to his high-octane bullpen that kept the Yankees in the game for a while, at least.

“That’s a difficult decision,” said Boone, now a free agent in spirit, “but the one I felt I needed to make.”

Perhaps more confidence would’ve been merited had Cole’s shoddy performance not resembled a couple of his recent starts. The 31-year-old wound up posting a 1-2 record with an 8.24 ERA over only 19 ²/₃ innings in his last four starts. Bosox shortstop Xander Bogaerts tagged a 2-and-1, first-inning changeup over the wall in center field for a two-run blast, and designated-hitter Kyle Schwarber added a solo moonshot to right field off a 1-and-2 fastball in the third.

Did Cole simply never recover sufficiently from the left hamstring injury that felled him on Sept. 7? Was he exhausted from the 2021 grind that featured a leap from 60 games to 162 and a case of COVID in addition to the hamstring ailment? Did the crackdown on sticky stuff do him in? Did he actually feel pressure in these big spots despite plenty of experience and success in other big spots, including in a Yankees uniform this year and last?

“The interruptions of the second half with COVID and the hamstring could have contributed some,” Boone acknowledged.

Cole, not surprisingly, pooh-poohed any queries that could be perceived as excuses: “The other team’s dealing with the same type of situation. When it’s all said and done, I didn’t perform the way I wanted to perform tonight.”

The Yankees face a plethora of questions about where to go from here. Yet the model still calls for Cole to lead the way, and while his overall regular-season numbers (a 3.23 ERA and 243 strikeouts in 30 starts totaling 181 ¹/₃ ⅓ innings) should be good enough to land him as high as second place in the AL Cy Young Award voting behind Toronto’s Robbie Ray, there’s no ignoring that he posted a 2.68 ERA before the All-Star break and a 4.41 after it, including this stinker.

In February 2020, as Cole prepared for his first Yankees spring training, Hal Steinbrenner told The Post, “He’s young. He’s healthy. Nine years, I expect we’re going to win some championships.”

We’re two years down and no championships, this season ending sooner than last, and this time Cole must take a healthy share of blame. Whatever the reason, he couldn’t come through when his team needed him the most.

He surely won’t forget this night. Yankees fans definitely won’t. Among the many items on Cole’s pinstriped to-do list, he must now add redemption.