Alek Manoah did not back down last August, when Gerrit Cole led the charge of outraged Yankees spilling onto the field, and he is not backing down now.
About five months after the Blue Jays standout starting pitcher called Cole the “worst cheater” in baseball history, Manoah is standing by comments that went viral.
“I said what I said,” Manoah said before his Blue Jays and the Yankees opened a series in The Bronx on Friday night.
What he said, when asked by NBA big man Serge Ibaka on a Sportsnet cooking show, was that the Yankees ace has cheated more than anyone in the game.
“He cheated,” Manoah said on “How Hungry Are You” in November. “He used a lot of sticky stuff to make his pitches better. He kind of got called out on it.”
Ahead of an intriguing face-off with Cole on Saturday, Manoah did not hint at any regrets.
When asked by Ibaka about cheaters in baseball, he name-dropped Cole instead of facing the show’s punishment for not answering the question.
“It was a game show, and I wasn’t trying to drink cricket tea,” said Manoah, who added he has “never really talked” with Cole.
The drama between the two began in earnest on Aug. 21, when Manoah drilled Aaron Judge with an up-and-in, 91-mph sinker that prompted Judge to take a couple of steps toward the mound and share some words with Manoah.
Manoah told Judge he did not hit him on purpose, and some in the Yankees’ home dugout — notably a shouting Cole, who was not pitching that day — took steps onto the field to stand up for their star slugger.
“I don’t think there were really any fireworks between me and [Judge],” said Manoah, a 2022 All-Star who is off to a poor start this season (6.98 ERA). “My job is to go out there and try to get him out, and that’s what I’m going to try to do [Saturday].”
There might not have been fireworks between Manoah and Judge, but there could have been between Manoah and Cole.
After Manoah listened to Cole yell at him from foul territory, he challenged Cole, through the media, to go closer.
“I think if Gerrit wants to do something, he can walk past the Audi sign next time,” Manoah said after the game, referring to the advertisement on the field between the Yankees’ dugout and first-base line.
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Approached in the clubhouse Friday, Cole said he did not have time to talk before Yankees pitchers stretched and threw.
The star righty is one of the faces of the sticky-stuff crackdown, the league trying to eliminate substances that give pitchers an unnatural grip with which to spin off their pitches.
Cole has acknowledged that he had to adjust following Major League Baseball’s enforcement of the foreign-substance ban and has not directly answered whether he formerly used Spider Tack, a particularly sticky paste, to improve his spin rates.
Since the ban, Cole has still been effective and might be at his best this season, pitching to a 0.95 ERA in four starts.
Both managers downplayed the pitching showdown Saturday, though Manoah’s skipper said “you could say” there is a rivalry between Cole and Manoah.
“I think the comments in the offseason were in a weird environment that he probably wishes he didn’t say,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said shortly before Manoah did not retreat from those comments. “But I think more so, it’s just us versus them, a division opponent.”
In four career starts in The Bronx — including his major league debut in May 2021 — Manoah has pitched to a 1.52 ERA.
He, too, emphasized that the matchup is important more so because it is within the AL East.
But the 25-year-old seems to thrive on bigger stages, and The Bronx is a large one.
“This is where my career started,” Manoah said. “Obviously super-excited to be able to come here, and the fans are super-passionate here, as everybody knows. It’s a great place to play.”
— Additional reporting by Ryan Dunleavy