Gerrit Cole stretched out to making 50 throws from 120 feet Tuesday and could advance to throwing off the mound “sometime next week, Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.
“You’re out to 120, so it’s moving,” Cole said. “Moving along.”
Though 120 feet is typically the farthest a rehabbing pitcher will extend out before he progresses to a mound, Boone said that didn’t mean this was the last step for Cole moving to bullpen sessions.
“I just think he’s pretty far along in that,” Boone said before the Yankees hosted the A’s. “Pretty aggressive in where he’s been throwing — I don’t necessarily think it means he’s getting on the mound immediately. It may be sometime next week. But I know at least so far in the process and how he’s done and how it’s going is encouraging.”
Out since early March with nerve inflammation and edema in his right elbow, Cole has maintained he is focused on taking his rehab on a day-to-day basis and not getting too far ahead of himself. In that regard, he threw Monday and Tuesday, is scheduled to be off Wednesday then will throw again Thursday if he continues to feel good.
“It’s kind of a similar ramp-up to what an offseason would be like,” said Cole, who is on the injured list for an arm injury for the first time in his career. “That’s kind of what we’re working off of. Just trying to nail it. Not go too fast, not go too slow either. But that’s kind of the structure we’re working off of.”
Asked where on the calendar he would be if this were the offseason, Cole was unsure.
“It’s a good question,” he said. “Still trying to kind of figure that out, because it’s not like the down time [a 3-4 week shutdown in which Cole kept his arm live] was down time. Trying to get through this week and then maybe have a better idea of where would be comparable.”
The expectation was Cole would need the full six-week equivalent of spring training before he is ready to join the Yankees. But most pitchers show up at camp having thrown multiple bullpen sessions, so it is not clear when that six-week timeline would start for Cole. He is not eligible to come off the 60-day IL until May 27 at the earliest, though he will almost certainly need longer than that.
Infield prospect Jorbit Vivas was activated off the injured list at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday and played his first game since suffering a left orbital fracture on the final day of spring training.