Maybe it didn’t matter. 

The Yankees already were down 2-0 in Game 3 and it felt like if the game were allowed to continue from Saturday night until NFL games kicked off Sunday they were never going to score against the Astros. Houston’s pitching has had the Yankees hitters’ number — and that number is zero. 

Still, the top of the sixth inning did not play out well for Aaron Boone and the Yankees. There was a sense of being ill-prepared for the moment. 

Let’s transport to the moment. 

Gerrit Cole had pitched well through five innings. But two issues had built his pitch count and put the Yankees behind. In the first inning, after striking out Jose Altuve and Jeremy Pena, Cole hit Yordan Alvarez on the toe with a breaking ball with his ninth pitch of the inning. He would not give up a run, but by the time he extracted himself, Cole had used 21 pitches. 

Cole produced two outs on four pitches in the second. Christian Vazquez then lifted a fly between Harrison Bader and Aaron Judge. They were the Yankees’ best two defenders playing in ALCS Game 3. But their miscommunication led to Judge cutting in front of and distracting Bader, who had the ball go off his glove for an error. As too often happened when something went wrong this year, Cole did not pick his team up. Instead, he gave up a homer for a ninth straight postseason game, this one to Chas McCormick. 

That is why Cole had 84 pitches entering the sixth and the Yankees trailed 2-0. Alex Bregman led off with a double. At that point, the Yankees had scored four runs in the first 23 innings of this series. They had one hit against Astros starter Cristian Javier, which meant one hit in the 12 innings he had pitched at Yankee Stadium this year. 

The Yankees were down 2-0 in games and 2-0 in Game 3. This was a must-win game and the Yankees were going to have trouble getting to two runs to tie and three to win. Thus, Bregman had to be treated as the series-winning run. Everything had to be done to prevent him from scoring. Whoever Boone thought was his best reliever needed to be up. 

But no one got up until three pitches into a Kyle Tucker plate appearance. And it wasn’t the Yankees’ best reliever — take your choice on Clay Holmes or Jonathan Loaisiga, or even the fearless Wandy Peralta. It was their fourth-best choice. Lou Trivino began to warm. 

“That’s a fair question,” Boone said Sunday. “That’s one way to look at it, but also at that point, I’m kind of thinking if we got to go to someone there early in the sixth, I’m going to need ’em all to get back around. I did like Trivino at the bottom of the lineup there. But I think there’s a case, especially once you get the bases loaded there, that Holmes or even Loaisiga could have been in play there.” 

If I have a problem with Boone’s managing style it is emphasized here. This feels like in a pregame meeting hours before first pitch it was decided that Trivino would be a good matchup for the bottom of the lineup and that the better relievers would be needed for the lethal top of Houston’s order over the final three innings. But that is theory. In real time, this was the crisis moment. Again, Bregman cannot score. So what sounded good about using your fourth-best reliever at 3 p.m. looked far worse in the sixth inning with actual realities. 

And here is the thing. Boone still had time to change his mind. Tucker had fouled a ball off his knee to make the count 1-2. He was down in pain a bit, stayed in and Cole threw three straight balls to make it first and second. At that point Jose Trevino went toward the mound, followed quickly out of the dugout by pitching coach Matt Blake. If you are trying to buy time, the usual move is to have the catcher go out slowly, talk alone to the pitcher and begin heading back before the pitching coach comes out slowly and stays until chased by an umpire. 

But here Trevino and Blake were much quicker than necessary. Yuli Gurriel blooped a first-pitch single to right to load the bases. Boone came out of the dugout with Cole at 96 pitches. He stopped short of the first-base line and seemed to mouth, “Are you OK?” to Cole. Boone said both Saturday and Sunday he was doing that to give Trivino more time to warm. 

Except what was that? Three seconds more? Trivino already had warmed for more than three minutes. If buying time were that vital, then tell Blake to take his time out to the mound. This played like even Boone wasn’t sure what to do because really the only choice to keep Bregman at third was his best starter (Cole) or his best reliever (Loaisiga or Holmes). But Boone never showed us who he thinks his best reliever is by warming him in this four-alarm moment. Trey Mancini was due up and in his first at-bat he had crushed a ball to Death Valley that would have been a homer in 22 of 30 stadiums, but was an out at Yankee Stadium. He walked in his second at-bat. 

So after initially hesitating to cross the first-base line and make this a second trip to the mound and an automatic removal of Cole, Boone decided not to let his ace face Mancini again. His body language played like he was reluctantly turning to his fourth best reliever. Mancini hit a sacrifice fly to bring home Bregman. That Vazquez followed with a two-run single felt both like piling on and irrelevant. Is everything different if the Yankees hold it at 2-0 for their final four turns at bat where a walk and homer could tie the score? We will never know. 

Boone turned to Trivino. The score ballooned to 5-0. Houston took a three games to none lead.