As Struggles Persist, The Yankees Lose Games Gerrit Cole Pitches.

An top-flight starter typically starts 30 times during a full season Maybe without physical issues closer to 33 and in more than two-thirds of those outings, his team is expected to win.

Yet this year, the Yankees are suddenly unable to win when ace Gerrit Cole takes the mound. They are now 16-10 this season when he starts and 9-10 since winning his first seven outings and perhaps in continuing the downward trend of this negative summer swoon, the Yankees are on a three-game losing streak when he starts.

Some of it not his fault. Such as when he allows one or two runs in six innings only to see the Yankees absorb two installments of their worst loss of the season such as when they were handed 8-7 losses at Colorado July 16 and again in Miami last Sunday.

Then there are games where Cole simply did not have anything from good stuff to good body language resulting in allowing a grand slam to a ninth-place hitter in Luis Urias and a two-run homer to an eighth-place hitter in Connor Wong.

Cole’s rough outing is symbolic of the Yankees current malaise that spans seven games. When it rains it pours and that is what the Red Sox are doing so far, getting the lead early by capitalizing on the Yankees’ inability to execute and putting games out of reach within the first hour.

“It’s tough,” he said. “It’s, uh, I don’t recall experiencing anything like this before in my career. How you handle adversity and how you get through it is really ultimately how you’ll be judged.

Cole is never at a loss for words given his frequent expansive answers but like the Yankees could not offer a clear cut cause for the latest installment of their struggles.

“It wasn’t my best stuff today, but I put a lot of well-located pitches and paired a lot of good pitches together,” Cole said. “For whatever reason, they were extra focused and able to bring out their best bullets today. Not only did they capitalize on poor pitches but they capitalized on really good pitches. It’s just baseball. It’s tough sometimes.”

For the Yankees “it’s tough sometimes expands to well over a month. When they followed up a 6-3 win over Baltimore with an 8-4 victory on July 4, they were 10 games over at 48-38. The next night they gave up four runs in the sixth and then were blown out 14-1. Those losses triggered a 12-25 slide that featured things like a series loss in Colorado, a three-game sweep to the Angels and based on recent sampling the Yankees are not showing any signs of reversing the downward trend that not only has them missing postseason for the first time since 2016 but also threatens their streak of winning seasons.

The Yankees are now 19 losses away from securing their first losing season since going 76-86 in 1992. Back then even as some of the old guard from 1989 through 1991 was being phased out, the Yankees were slowly developing their new core by using Bernie Williams for 60 games over the final two months with Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera in the early stages of their pro careers.

After the 1992 season, the Yankees made two transformative moves by signing Wade Boggs and Jimmy Key and then won 88 games in 1993, a favorite season amongst many Yankee fans old enough to remember those days.

It is unknown if the Yankees will make similar transformative moves again and attempt to fix a team whose average age is 29.1 and hamstrung by contracts for aging players like Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu.

In the meantime, the Yankees will attempt replicate the run of their 1995 predecessors who won 26 of 33 to claim the first wild-card spot in a 144-game season.

“We haven’t been able to execute,” Isiah Kiner-Falefa said. “Haven’t been able to get the big hit. Just, like, sloppy baseball all around. But hopefully we can turn this thing around quick.”

Based on recent results of teams ahead of them, notably the Seattle Mariners, time may be quickly running out for the Yankees, whose fans are clamoring for a significant change that may not happen or if it does may not represent the change they had in mind.