Cole ‘disheartened’ by discourse over arm injuries
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Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Gerrit Cole threw a baseball for the first time in four weeks Monday. He threw it 25 times from 60 feet. He noted 22 of the 25 tosses hit his target.
The catch session, the first of three scheduled this week, represented an important checkpoint in Cole’s recovery from nerve inflammation in his right elbow that will sideline him at least until late May. That’s a better outlook than a few of his peers across the majors.
Cole is one of several prominent pitchers to sustain a major arm injury since teams reported for spring training in February. The recent surge was unnerving enough for Tony Clark, the Major League Baseball Players Association executive director, to release a statement Saturday blaming the increase in elbow injuries on the pitch clock. Major League Baseball responded with its own statement, without attribution, dismissing Clark’s thesis that day, pointing to the rise of pitcher injuries in recent decades, long before the pitch clock was enforced.
For 20 minutes Monday, Cole, the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, addressed the surge of injuries and the ensuing exchange between the parties, saying he was “disheartened” by the back-and-forth.
“I’m just frustrated it’s a combative issue,” he said. “It’s like, ‘OK, we have divorced parents and the child’s misbehaving and we can’t get on the same page to get the child to behave.’ Not that the players are misbehaving, but we have an issue here and we need to get on the same page to at least try and fix it.”
In the meantime, numerous pitchers are dealing with similar injuries.
Across the clubhouse from Cole on Monday was Jonathan Loaisiga, diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. He said he is tentatively scheduled to undergo season-ending surgery next weekend.
Across the field were the Miami Marlins, the team perhaps hardest hit by pitcher injuries. Last week, the club announced 21-year-old Eury Perez, one of the sport’s top young pitchers, will undergo Tommy John surgery. He joined fellow starters Sandy Alcantara (elbow), Edward Cabrera (shoulder) and Braxton Garrett (shoulder) on the Marlins’ injured list.
In addition to Perez, Guardians ace Shane Bieber found out he needed Tommy John surgery, and an MRI revealed structural damage in Braves ace Spencer Strider‘s elbow over the weekend. They joined a list of players out with significant arm injuries that includes Shohei Ohtani, Jacob deGrom, Robbie Ray, Shane McClanahan, Walker Buehler, Lucas Giolito and Dustin May, among others.
Cole said he didn’t have any solutions for the problem but contended MLB’s assertion — that the pitch clock isn’t a factor in the injuries — after one season of implementation is “shortsighted.”
“We are going to really understand the effects of … The pitch clock maybe five years down the road,” Cole said. “But to dismiss it out of hand, I didn’t think that was helpful to the situation. I think the players are obviously the most important aspect of this industry and this product. And the care of the players should be of utmost importance to both sides.”
Cole, 33, recalled “a couple of situations” early last season when he was caught off guard by fatigue. He said he believes the pitch clock was the reason, but he was “able to handle it.” Fellow Yankees right-hander Clarke Schmidt said the clock is a factor.
“I think it can play a factor for sure,” Schmidt said. “I think when you’re having a high-stress inning and it’s like that thing seems like it’s almost zero seconds every single time when there’s runners on base and you’re rushing to get back. So it definitely plays a factor.”
Cole argued the pitch clock is just one variable introduced in recent years that could have negatively impacted pitchers. He noted the shortened ramp-ups before the 2020 and 2022 seasons, the crackdown on pitchers using foreign substances for grip and the industry’s relentless arms race to throw harder and spin the ball more than ever as other possible elements.
“I think it’s just irresponsible for either side to say any one of those things definitely has no impact on pitchers’ elbows or shoulders,” Cole said. “That’s not helpful.”
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Tim Keown
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freeman was scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
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