If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate and had a car that you’re trying to nurse through one more winter because you can’t quite afford to replace it, you know the startup noise. Sort of a squeal on a rumble on a cough. You’re waking your old Ford Explorer from hibernation, and it would rather go back to bed.
Throwing arms are like that to some extent. As much as pitchers stay loose and work out all offseason — we no longer live in an age when a pitcher could spend all winter inside a bottle of whiskey, dry out on the train ride to Sarasota, and throw 250 innings without breathing hard — sometimes the body just does not ramp up to game fitness the way you’d expect.
As routine as injury announcements are this time of year, the end of last week was a bloodbath. Three pitchers who were going to end up on a lot of AL Cy Young shortlists — Gerrit Cole, George Kirby, and Grayson Rodriguez — all came down with some flavor of arm ickiness. Any kind of layoff at this point in the calendar can disrupt a pitcher’s ramp-up to the point that it imperils an Opening Day start, and three contenders are now praying that worse news isn’t coming.
Let’s start with Cole. The 2023 Cy Young winner has not only been one of the best pitchers in baseball throughout his career, he’s also been unbelievably durable. Is Cole worth $36 million a year because of his six top-five Cy Young finishes? Or is he worth it because, as the standard workload for a pitcher continues to shrink, the former UCLA man missed three starts, total, between the beginning of 2017 and the end of 2023?
Last year, Cole didn’t throw a pitch in anger until late June, as he battled elbow inflammation. Despite that late start, the Yankees’ deep playoff run meant Cole made 22 starts and threw 134 competitive innings — a significant effort by today’s math.
Cole got lit up by the Twins on Thursday, and while he physically felt fine during the game, he felt weird afterward. As you might expect, the Yankees sent him in for scans, and while there are no conclusive results as yet, two little tidbits have escaped that are making the tea leaves look bleak. First: He told reporters, “I’ve still got some hope,” which is not what you say if you think everything’s going to be fine. Second: On Sunday night, Jim Bowden of The Athletic reported that while Cole and the Yankees are waiting for a second opinion on his scans, the first opinion was that the ace will need Tommy John surgery.
If Cole has torn his UCL, the 2025 season is a write-off no matter what. And this is just about the least convenient time for a pitcher to suffer that injury; standard Tommy John surgery comes with a recovery time between 12 and 18 months. If Cole skews toward the longer end of an average recovery time, that’s sayonara for 2026 as well. A year ago, Spencer Strider tore his UCL about a month further into the calendar than we are now; he got internal brace surgery, which cuts several months off the recovery time, and is ramping up to make his return sometime later this spring. If the internal brace is an option, and Cole chooses to go that route, there’s a possibility he could salvage most or all of 2026. But at this juncture, he’s not even 100% sure he’s getting surgery at all, let alone what kind.
All we know now is that the Yankees are almost certain to be without their no. 1 starter for at least a chunk of this season, probably the whole season. Not that there’s ever a good time to get that news, but the timing is far from ideal: On Thursday, the same day Cole’s elbow started barking, Brian Cashman announced that Luis Gil’s lat strain would keep the reigning AL Rookie of the year out for at least three months. The hits just keep on coming, so to speak.
Last season, six Yankee pitchers produced more than 1.0 WAR in the regular season. Gil is out for half the season and Cole is probably facing something worse. Clay Holmes and Nestor Cortes are no longer with the organization. That leaves Carlos Rodón and Clarke Schmidt as New York’s best two returning starters.
Now, a rotation headlined by Max Fried, Rodón, Schmidt, and Marcus Stroman could be really good. All four of those pitchers have been excellent in the recent past. Unfortunately, all four have also suffered through inconsistency or injuries of their own, to a greater or lesser extent. And if anything else goes wrong, the Yankees are already using most of their starting pitching depth. After current no. 5 starter Will Warren, the next man up is Carlos Carrasco, who’s in pinstripes on an NRI. Carrasco turns 38 a week from Friday, and he’s had 1 1/2 healthy and effective seasons since 2018.
I can say two good things about the Yankees’ starting pitching situation: First, they answered the question of whatever happened to Brandon Liebrandt (also in Yankee camp on an NRI, though if he ends up in the rotation something has gone horribly wrong). Second, they’re in much better shape than the Orioles are.
Last year’s Orioles took Corbin Burnes for a spin and repeated their fate from the year before: swept out of the playoffs at the first opportunity. Not that that was Burnes’ fault; the only thing that went wrong in his only postseason start was his teammates getting shut out.
With Burnes gone, the O’s decided to run back the old plan: Hope that putting Dean Kremer in line to start a playoff game doesn’t come back to haunt them. And they added a couple old guys in free agency: 41-year-old Charlie Morton and 35-year-old Tomoyuki Sugano.
But Baltimore’s plan, such as it is, depends on Rodriguez continuing to develop into a front-end starter. He very well might, but it won’t happen in the next 10 days. Rodriguez had been out of sorts early in spring training, then reported triceps soreness that evolved into discomfort in the elbow. According to manager Brandon Hyde, Rodriguez’s UCL is still sound, so maybe a cortisone shot and a week off will do the trick.
Even if it does, that still sets Rodriguez back past Opening Day. Once he starts throwing again, he won’t be ready to go right out and toss 100 pitches. He’s got to build up strength and stamina, and by the time he’s game-ready, the Orioles will probably be well into the regular season.
The same day, the Orioles announced that reliever Andrew Kittredge will be out for several months as he recovers from knee surgery. Kittredge isn’t a household name as a closer, but he threw 70 2/3 innings with a 2.80 ERA for the Cardinals last year, and the Orioles could sorely use that combination of volume and quality. If he misses the season, the Orioles would be out $9 million — or 5.6% of their payroll — and have nothing to show for it but a club option on Kittredge for 2026. That wouldn’t be a serious issue for every team, but it is for Baltimore.
I was going to make a dark quip about how the Red Sox look more and more like the team to beat in the AL East. And while that might actually be true, it’s important to remember that Boston is also down a pair of starting pitchers — Kutter Crawford and Brayan Bello — at this point in the preseason. That could be particularly bad news for Bello, who signed a six-year extension that kicked in last year, and is currently battling shoulder soreness.
And speaking of shoulder soreness: Let’s talk about Kirby.
The strike-throwin’-est man in baseball and a perennial hipster Cy Young pick, Kirby had exhibited Cole-like durability throughout his young major league career. Shoulder soreness had been a problem in the past, but all the way back in 2020 and 2021. Mariners GM Justin Hollander said that while an MRI on Kirby’s shoulder looked good, the team is still going to keep him off the mound until the inflammation goes down. The plan is to get him back on the major league roster after the first two weeks of the regular season.
“Shoulder injury,” no matter how minor, is one of those phrases that makes your blood run cold. Say it around a major league pitcher and you’ll get the same reaction as if you yelled “Fire!” on a submarine. Or so I imagine; I’ve never been able to test that theory. But you get the idea.
Mariners fans would be forgiven for jumping straight to the worst-case scenario. This is not an organization that conditions its fans to be optimistic, generally speaking. But if Hollander’s assessment of the situation ends up being accurate — Kirby needs some rest, and will be back in mid-to-late April — this is a non-event.
Unfortunately, the Mariners can’t afford to lose Kirby for much longer. With Kirby, they have the best rotation in the AL, perhaps in all of baseball. Without him, they have a very good rotation. But they’re basically running back a bullpen that was 16th last year in ERA- and 21st in WPA. Their offense was decent in 2024, on the aggregate, but things got super weird. Victor Robles hit like Corey Seager for half the year, but Julio Rodríguez lost a third of his home runs and J.P. Crawford lost 60 points of batting average.
Hoping for the best from that group might fly in one of the central divisions, but in the AL West the Rangers are going to bounce back from their World Series hangover, and I won’t believe the Astros are cooked until they’re dead and buried. Seattle’s margin for error is not thick enough to withstanding losing Kirby for a span of months.
Bad times! Cherish your elbows and/or shoulders, folks. You’ll miss them when you’re gone.
