With the dark clouds rolling in on the game right now, let’s get right to it:
GERRIT COLE, SP NYY (inflamed elbow)
While I made the best of a bad situation in Saturday’s Flash, things seem to have taken a negative turn for Gerrit Cole. Everyone I’ve spoken with won’t confirm anything, especially until he’s done with his visits, but they’re consistently negative. Does that mean there’s UCL damage and that he’ll need some flavor of reconstruction? Quite possibly. I believe we’ll know as soon as Monday and that surgery, if needed, will happen quickly. Jim Bowden of The Athletic reported Monday morning that there’s been a recommendation of surgery.
No matter who does a reconstruction or how, that would end Cole’s season for this year and put him on the well-worn track of Tommy John rehab. He may not be ready for the start of next season if that’s the case, though there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t come back well. Most do, though there’s enough cases where it didn’t that people constantly mention it.
Cole is a reminder that pitchers are fine, until they’re not. He came back to camp, made one good start and showed no sign of the issues from 2024. If it is a UCL sprain, that has almost nothing to do with last year’s issue, or the pitching he did, or something he changed. (I don’t know that he changed anything.) As I said, we should have certainty on this soon and we’ll have to figure out where the Yankees go after that.
What is more clear is that the Yankees aren’t any better at preventing injuries than anyone else. This is despite some great people and some focus on this, and a reminder that no one is seemingly very good at one of the most expensive problem that baseball has. For all the talk of the $550 million dollar ESPN deal that was just opted out of, MLB loses that much on pitching injuries regularly and without much effort to change it. Maybe it’s time for a league wide effort to save some money and some arms.
GIANCARLO STANTON, DH NYY (inflamed elbows)
More bad news for the Yankees, as Giancarlo Stanton’s situation is almost exactly as I described it last week. “Severe” injuries in each elbow reads as tendonosis rather than the “tennis elbow” it was initially presented as. They likely went though all the managements and explored possibilities, but surgery is the most likely option. Not a good one, as scraping out dead tendon isn’t going to fix the issue completely and creates a problematic rehab, especially since this is bilateral.
While people are still talking in weeks and months for Stanton’s return, this feels more and more like a season ender and potentially a career ender. I don’t want to go way out over my skis on this one, as he could and seems to want to come back more quickly, but there’s just no comparable cases to base a return off of. He’ll be the first and that’s always difficult to read. Who knows, maybe it will be easy, but since no one we know of has ever done it, the success rate is currently 0 percent.
Focus on the surgery here. Having it would cost Stanton all of 2025 at a minimum. If there’s a lesser therapy out there that could get him back, I think both Stanton and the Yankees would be trying it. If surgery is the option, it’s the last one left to them. Even the best case scenarios now have Stanton playing a bit more than half the season, leaving the DH slot open to see how the Yankees elect to move things around and use that flexibility.