Following Tuesday's victory over the Phillies, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said the new personnel is "a fun brand of baseball."

On a team full of superstars, the likes of Greg Allen, Ryan LaMarre, and Estevan Florial elevated the Yankees in their two-game set against Philadelphia.

Maybe their biggest superstar in Gerrit Cole has taken notice.

"The personnel change … it’s just another thing you have to gameplan for," Cole told reporters on Thursday in Boston. "It forces you to execute potentially different gameplans, be aware on defense, be aware of the running game, you just have to put your focus other places as opposed to just locking into a single mindset, and it makes the club adaptable, too, that something is working. Maybe a player’s different set of skills is able to kind of defend that or make you have to adjust and go back and forth.”

Despite winning nine of their last 12 games, the Yankees are still 3.5 games behind the Oakland Athletics for a postseason spot. The Yankees are trying to gain ground in the Wild Card and AL East races, and they know they have a ways to go.

But Cole said the Yankees need to put their focus on themselves, rather than what teams ahead of them are doing.

"If you can control the things that you can control and you prepare, you gotta believe that with that process, the results will follow," Cole said. "So we’re kind of just locked in that mindset right now, I think. ...

“Certainly, we’re aware of it. That’s a goal, and we want to get to first place, we want to chase them down. But like I said ... if you can control the things you can control as a group, the outcomes should reflect that preparation. ... We’ve done that well so far, and today’s just another opportunity for us to get after the baseball and try to build on what we’ve been doing as of late, and just keep the focus on ourselves and just kind of methodically press forward to that...

"You can’t control how other teams are playing. It’s so important for us to dedicate all our focus to ourselves so that we can play the best we can."

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