NEW YORK (AP) — Gerrit Cole crouched behind the mound, stared at the dirt and after a 569-day absence climbed on the rubber in a major league game that mattered.
“Just let it rip downrange and see what we got,” the New York Yankees ace thought to himself.
Cole allowed two hits over six shutout innings Friday night in his return from elbow ligament reconstruction surgery. He left with a 1-0 lead that the Yankees wasted in a 4-2 loss to the major league-best
Tampa Bay Rays.
“It was almost like a second debut," the 35-year-old right-hander said. “It was nice to get back in the fire.”
Cole had not pitched a big league outing that counted since Game 5 of the World Series on Oct. 30, 2024. He had reconstructive surgery the following March 11, then started a rehab path that included two spring training outings this year and six minor league rehabilitation starts beginning April 17.
“Some ups and downs, for sure. A long road," Cole said. “And yet at some point tonight it was almost like I had never left.”
With a few days of stubble on his face, Cole warmed up to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
“Let’s go swing the rock around,” catcher Austin Wells told him. “Have fun.”
Cole averaged 96.1 mph with 35 four-seam fastballs, reaching a high of 98.6 mph in the first. He mixed in 13 sinkers, 10 sliders, eight changeups and six knuckle-curves.
“It's great to have our ace back in the mix,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He did a lot of game management things really well.”
Cole threw 50 of 72 pitches for strikes, starting 18 of 22 batters with an offering in the strike zone.
“It was lovely,” he said.
Chandler Simpson singled leading off and Junior Caminero walked but Cole retired Jonathan Aranda on a flyout, picked off a dancing Simpson at second and got Yandy Díaz to take a sinker for a called third strike.
Using his new overhead hand movement in his windup, adopted during his rehab, Cole needed just seven pitches in the third inning and four in the fourth. He retired 10 in a row during one stretch.
“He looked healthy to me,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “He’s as special as there is.”
Cole munched on a banana between innings at one point to keep up his energy. He struck out two and walked three, including Richie Palacios on four balls that followed a first-pitch strike and Taylor Walls on four straight balls.
Against the high-contact Rays, he induced just five misses among 31 swings.
“The command was good enough. It was hard to trust some off-speed pitches there early,” Cole said. “Controlled the zone well and sequenced well. Brought ourselves room inside the strike zone and beside some lapses in control kept pressure on the opposition throughout the at-bats.”
He thought there was room for improvement.
“There’s probably some opportunities to get a little further outside of the strike zone, but at the same time, knowing that that might not be as crisp as it has been before,” he said.
He joined a rotation that includes Carlos Rodón, Cam Schlittler, Will Warren and Ryan Weathers, taking the spot that opened when Max Fried went on the injured list because of a bone bruise in his left elbow.
Wells backed him with his first home run since April 28, a fifth-inning drive off Nick Martinez.
José Caballero, back at shortstop after missing 10 days because of a broken finger, allowed Simpson’s one-hopper to bounce off his glove leading of the eighth. The Rays burst ahead on Aranda's RBI double, Palacios' two-run single on a comebacker off the glove of leaping reliever Tim Hill and Ryan Vilade's sacrifice fly, then held on to improve to 4-0 against New York this year.
Yankees captain Aaron Judge went 0 for 4 with a game-ending flyout to the center-field warning track with a man on against Bryan Baker. Judge is in a 1-for-24 slide that dropped his average to .245 and has gone a career-high 11 games without any RBIs.
Cole will start again next week at Kansas City. During his long rehab, he had thought about the night of his return.
“It was kind of what I imagined it would be,” he said with a smile.
___
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
