It has been 469 days since we last saw Gerrit Cole on an MLB mound, and it won’t be that much longer before the Yankees’ ace makes his triumphant return. After missing an entire season to Tommy John surgery, it is uncertain whether we can still consider him to be the Yankees’ ace, but there is no doubting that he remains the leader of the staff and one of the top voices in the clubhouse. Knowing his competitive spirit and the resulting desire to erase the mistakes made in Game 5 of the 2024 World
Series, I am choosing to remain bullish on Cole’s projections for 2026.
2025 Stats: Missed season due to Tommy John surgery
2026 ZiPS Projections: 19 starts, 115 IP, 7-5, 3.91 ERA, 3.98 FIP, 23.5% K%, 7.0% BB%, 1.25 HR/9, 1.17 WHIP, 1.8 fWAR
Cole injured his elbow in spring training last year — the same elbow that suffered nerve inflammation in 2024, costing him the first half of the season but determined to not require surgical intervention at that point — and underwent complete UCL reconstruction including an internal brace procedure on March 11, 2025. He was provided a 14-month recovery timetable at that point and the most recent reports confirm that he is right on schedule. He began his throwing program last August and threw his first bullpen at the start of November, with he and the team continuing to target an early-June return, though late-May is not out of the question.
Cole’s projections reflect that initial two-month absence as well as the expected rust for a pitcher coming off his first major surgery. ZiPS expects his ERA and FIP to hover just below four, which would be his worst marks as a Yankee, accompanied by the worst strikeout-minus-walk ratio (16.5-percent) since his final season with the Pirates.
It’s not just the return from injury that underlies this diminished performance. We had already begun to see a transformation in Cole’s pitcher profile prior to his injury. He lost about a mile per hour off his average fastball velocity in each of his last two seasons, though we can’t say whether this is age-related loss of stuff or an intentional effort on Cole’s part to save bullets for the grind of a long season with a further eye toward preserving longevity into his late-30s.
His first few seasons in pinstripes, Cole still pitched like the bulldog that was unleashed in Houston, looking to bully every hitter he faced into submission. The strikeouts flowed in bunches from this approach, but he was also prone to the long ball when he would stubbornly try to throw the ball by the hitter rather than pitch to a spot. However, in 2023 and 2024, he shifted his focus from hunting strikeouts to hunting early outs on harmless contact. Indeed, the strikeouts began to dry up, but so did the home runs as Cole improved his barrel and hard-hit rates, culminating in his best season with the Yankees from a run prevention standpoint and his long-elusive Cy Young award in 2023. All this being said, all these data points are at least two years old, and we simply will not know what Cole is capable of until he starts throwing in live game situations.
That’s the leading problem when it comes to Cole: uncertainty. We just don’t have enough data points to project with any clarity what his 2026 will look like. How do you project a starter who hasn’t thrown a pitch in MLB since Game 5 of the 2024 World Series? How do you project someone with just a 95-inning sample size over the last two seasons, when most recent performance is the best predictor of future outcomes? How do you project how his body will respond now at the age of 35 coming off the first Tommy John surgery — and first arm surgery of any kind — of his career?
The error bars are so wide that it really feels like anything is possible. His pedigree as the former best pitcher in all of baseball might lull you into a false sense of security when it comes to his floor and allows you to dream of a ceiling as a Cy Young candidate. On the other hand, there is a legitimate chance he pitches less than half the season should he encounter a delay at any stage of his rehab.
If the Yankees are searching for a kernel of hope, they might look to Justin Verlander as the ideal outcome for Cole. Verlander underwent Tommy John surgery on September 30, 2020, and missed the entirety of the 2021 campaign. He made his return to an MLB mound on April 9, 2022, having thrown just six big league innings since the end of the 2019 season. He blew every expectation out of the water, making 28 starts with a 1.75 ERA, 2.49 FIP, 185 strikeouts, and 6.1 fWAR to secure the third AL Cy Young Award of his career at the age of 39.
I don’t need to tell you that it is unreasonable to expect Cole to come back and win the Cy Young, if for no other reason than the existence of a certain pitcher named Tarik Skubal. And of course, far more pitchers who undergo Tommy John surgery struggle in their first season back, many of them younger than Cole.
Instead, the focus for Cole is and should remain getting fully healthy and properly built up without putting unnecessary stress on himself to return by some predetermined date. If there is any pitcher on the Yankees’ staff who I would trust to complete his rehab properly, it’s Cole. He’s one of the true pitching professors in the game, and he knows better than anyone else what his body needs to eventually take the ball every fifth day.
See more of the Yankees Previews series here.
