For Cortes, a nightmare Brewers debut against former club

NEW YORK – Three pitches, three home runs. That had never happened to any pitcher to begin any game in AL/NL history.

And it was only the start of a Brewers debut that Nestor Cortes would just as soon forget.

Cortes, the veteran left-hander who came to the Brewers from the Yankees in a December trade, yielded home runs on each of his first three pitches in a Milwaukee uniform, four home runs in the first inning and five home runs overall without getting an out in the third. It marked a sour start to an afternoon when Brewers pitchers allowed nine homers to set a franchise record they didn’t want – three from Aaron Judge, who missed a fourth by mere feet – on the way to losing, 20-9, at Yankee Stadium on Saturday.

“You think you’ve seen it all, and you haven’t,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “Because we saw it today: Three pitches, three homers. It’s like, really? Usually you wake up from that, you know what I mean? You go, ‘Ah, that can’t ever happen.’”

Cortes left Yankee Stadium while reporters were in Murphy's office after the game and was unavailable for comment. Through a club spokesperson, Cortes later apologized and said he would address reporters prior to Sunday's series finale.

“I don’t know how he handled it, but I do know he’s a professional and he’s a damn good pitcher,” said backup first baseman Jake Bauers, whose scoreless eighth inning made him the only player to pitch in the game for the Brewers without allowing a run. “He’s going to bounce back, and he’s going to be solid for us.”

Cortes found trouble from the very first pitch – a 90.1 mph four-seam fastball at the top of the strike zone to longtime Brewer-killer Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt hit it to left-center field for a home run. Then Cody Bellinger hit another four-seamer at the top of the zone for a homer to right-center. And Judge hammered a cutter that sailed a Statcast-projected 468 feet to left.

“Nestor's been here for years, one of the best lefty pitchers in the game,” Judge said. “He's a guy that's going to go out there, throw strikes, attack you. So we just tried to go out there and be aggressive in our zone. ‘Goldy’ and ‘Belli’ set the table there and got things going. The place was rocking once I walked up there.”

When Austin Wells added a fourth Yankees home run in the first inning, and Anthony Volpe hit a two-out, full-count, three-run homer off Cortes in the second inning right after the Brewers had clawed back to within 4-3, and Judge (grand slam) and Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit back-to-back home runs off Brewers reliever Connor Thomas in the third, and Judge homered again off Thomas in the fourth, and so on, MLB’s research teams were scrambling to keep up.

Here is some of the trivia they uncovered:

? New York’s nine home runs set a single-game record for Yankees hitters and for Brewers pitchers. The Brewers had yielded eight home runs in a game on five occasions, most recently at Washington on Aug. 18, 2019.

? Cortes became the seventh Brewers pitcher to allow five or more home runs in a game. The last was Michael Blazek, who served up six homers in a spot start against the Nationals on that August day in 2017, including one span of homers for four consecutive batters.

? Cortes is the fourth Brewers pitcher to allow four or more home runs in an inning. Blazek, Dave Bush and Mike Caldwell are in that group.

? Cortes became the first pitcher since the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ralph Branca in 1949 to allow five-plus homers and five-plus walks in a game.

Murphy, whose pitching staff is severely thinned by injuries to start the season, kept Cortes in the game as long as possible hoping he could discover a rhythm. He dismissed the notion that Cortes’ former teammates picked up a tell, and he seemed confident of Cortes’ health, since a visit from the athletic trainer in the second inning yielded no change.

Was Cortes just too keyed up to face his former team?

“I think that probably added to something. I don’t think we’re going to figure it out,” Murphy said. “When guys don’t have good stuff and the wind is blowing out and you’re going against a team with that firepower, everything comes together.”

The Brewers did manage to avoid some other dubious history thanks to Bauers pitching a scoreless bottom of the eighth, which included a Judge lineout to left field with a four-homer game on the line. With that, Milwaukee kept the Yankees one home run shy of tying the AL/NL record for a single game (10), and avoided matching Milwaukee’s franchise record for runs allowed in a game (21).

“I was joking with [Judge] when he was on deck, I gave him one of these,” Bauers said, pointing to his ribs. “I gave him the best curveball I have. He still hit it pretty good, but I think he topspun it, so I knew it was going to stay in.

“It was a funny moment on an otherwise not good day.”