Toronto’s Manoah stands by calling Cole a ‘cheater’

Alek Manoah did not back down last August, when Gerrit Cole led the charge of outraged Yankees spilling onto the field, and he is not backing down now.

About five months after the Blue Jays standout starting pitcher called Cole the “worst cheater” in baseball history, Manoah is standing by comments that went viral.

“I said what I said,” Manoah said before his Blue Jays beat the Yankees, 6-1, in their series opener in The Bronx on Friday night.

What he said, when asked by NBA big man Serge Ibaka on a Sportsnet cooking show, was that the Yankees ace has cheated more than anyone in the game.

“He cheated,” Manoah said on “How Hungry Are You” in November. “He used a lot of sticky stuff to make his pitches better. He kind of got called out on it.”

Ahead of an intriguing face-off with Cole on Saturday, Manoah did not hint at any regrets. When asked by Ibaka about cheaters in baseball, he name-dropped Cole instead of facing the show’s punishment for not answering the question.

“It was a game show, and I wasn’t trying to drink cricket tea,” said Manoah, who added he has “never really talked” with Cole.

The drama between the two began in earnest on Aug. 21, when Manoah drilled Aaron Judge with an up-and-in, 91-mph sinker that prompted Judge to take a couple of steps toward the mound and share some words with Manoah.

Manoah told Judge he did not hit him on purpose, and some in the Yankees’ home dugout — notably a shouting Cole, who was not pitching that day — took steps onto the field to stand up for their star slugger.

Approached in the clubhouse Friday, Cole said he did not have time to talk before Yankees pitchers stretched and threw. The star righty is one of the faces of the sticky-stuff crackdown, the league trying to eliminate substances that give pitchers an unnatural grip with which to spin off their pitches.