Whoopsie!

The Red Sox beat the Yankees yesterday, 7-1. The part I missed was the most pivotal part:

The Yankees began overthinking, and that’s when the trouble started

NEW YORK — In the epic baseball film “Bull Durham,” grizzled vet Crash Davis tells hot-shot hurler Nuke LaLoosh, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.”

This is what we saw Saturday afternoon in the fourth inning of the Red Sox’ 7-1 victory over Gerrit Cole and the Yankees.

The Yankees led, 1-0. Cole, the American League’s reigning Cy Young winner, had yielded no hits and faced the minimum 10 batters. The Sox were mired in a major slump and it looked like the first-place Bronx Bombers were on their way to another win.

And then the Yankees overthought things. Bigly.

As Rafael Devers (lifetime .333 with eight homers off Cole) stepped to the plate, Cole looked to his catcher, held up four fingers of his right hand, and swooshed his pitching arm across his body toward first base with a Fiedler-esque flourish.

Paying no heed to a century and a half of Major League Baseball, Cole intentionally walked Devers with a 1-0 lead and nobody on base.

Left unmentioned, at least explicitly, is precisely why this move backfires. This Outkick column alludes to the move not backfiring, citing "Barry Bonds, Mike Trout or Judge himself getting intentionally walked in unusual situations" as the examples. My best guess without looking it up is - it does backfire most of the time, as it did this time.