TAMPA, Fla. — As dreary, gray and rainy as the Florida morning was, an even gloomier sense of dread blanketed Yankees spring training on Monday.
That was because Gerrit Cole, the club’s ace pitcher, appeared destined for season-ending surgery. In baseball, elbow discomfort like the kind Cole complained of over the weekend is so often followed by Tommy John surgery. And when it was revealed that Cole had left Florida and journeyed to California for a second opinion, bad news felt inevitable.
So while Cole’s recent past provided a glimmer of hope — just last year, he overcame a spring training elbow issue, avoided going under the knife and returned to a big-league mound by summer — the general outlook around Yankees camp was unavoidably bleak.
And at 6:15 p.m., once the sky had turned blue and everyone had gone home, the Yankees announced the crushing news: Cole will undergo Tommy John surgery on Tuesday. He will not pitch in 2025.
The team added that “further updates will occur post-surgery.”
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It’s a devastating blow to a Yankees club coming off the franchise’s first World Series appearance since 2009. Cole didn’t debut until June 19 last year, as he recovered from that now-foreboding elbow issue, but he hit his stride by mid-August and was his usual dominant self during the Yankees’ October run.
After the club’s heart-wrenching loss in Game 5 of the World Series — a game in which Cole made a crucial error on an infield dribbler — the Yankees’ ace resumed his throwing program much sooner than in previous winters. The thinking behind that strategy, one utilized by a number of other pitchers, is that resting the arm for an extended stretch can increase the potential for injury upon the resumption of throwing. The change to Cole’s offseason training was at least partially motivated by his arm issues the previous spring. And entering camp, he expressed a positive outlook about his health.
“I’m in a really good spot, compared to years past,” Cole professed Feb. 12 during his return media conference. “Probably slightly ahead of where we were last year.”
For the first month of spring training, Cole backed up that optimism on the hill. He progressed normally through bullpens and live at-bats. In his first exhibition start Feb. 28. against the Blue Jays, the 34-year-old tossed 3 1/3 innings and struck out five. Most importantly, he was upbeat about his outing.
“This is my fifth time facing hitters,” Cole said that night. “I was pleasantly surprised at the command. We did a good job maintaining the velocity that we were looking for, not going too high.”
Things changed after Cole’s next start, a March 6 clunker against the Minnesota Twins in which he allowed six runs across 2 2/3 innings. A few days after that, it came out that he felt discomfort in his pitching elbow and was undergoing imaging.
Since that point, this has all felt like just a matter of time.
General manager Brian Cashman still has a club that boasts an enviable cache of talented starters. Even with Cole out for the season and reigning AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil down with a lat strain for a few months, the Yankees have a strong quartet of Max Fried, Carlos Rodón, Clarke Schmidt and Marcus Stroman, who seemed destined for the bullpen at the outset of camp, before the downpour of injuries. The fifth starter spot will come down to veteran Carlos Carrasco or youngster Will Warren, who impressed in 3 2/3 innings on Monday.
“Not a death sentence for us, by any means,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone opined on the broadcast before the news about his ace had even dropped.
But there is no replacing Cole. The 2023 AL Cy Young winner remains one of the sport’s top arms as he inches through his 30s. This will be the first major surgery of his career, a career that has seen him put together a compelling Hall of Fame résumé. Now, that résumé will forever have a blank space next to the year 2025, as Cole will spend the next seven months relegated to cheerleading and game-planning as he rehabs his reconstructed elbow.
When asked about Cole’s status during Monday’s broadcast, Boone, always the steadfast optimist, opted to take the long view regarding his ace’s future.
“If he does have to get surgery, hopefully that’s something, too, that serves us well in the long haul,” he said. “The reality is: Gerrit still has a lot of pitching in front of him in his career, pitching with the Yankees, and we want that to be as successful as it’s been already.”
Pitching is a violent, volatile pursuit, one that collects victims by the dozen and can strike ruthlessly in an instant. And Cole’s injury, considering his recent past, cannot be considered a surprise. Given the “mileage” as Boone put it, built up on his arm, Cole was, in some ways, ducking doom with every pitch he threw.
In the end, even one of the game’s most methodical workers and most durable workhorses was no match for the always-lurking dangers of hucking a baseball 95 miles per hour. And now, it will be quite a while before the Yankees’ enduring, domineering ace gets to put on the pinstripes again.
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