Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. If you’re one of the thousands of people who signed up for Bluesky while Twitter was down at the start of NFL free agency, you can follow me over there.
In today’s SI:AM:
😞 Bad news for the Yankees
🐏 College basketball’s overlooked gem
📝 NFL free agent tracker
This could get ugly
Five months after they won the American League pennant, a return trip to the World Series is looking increasingly unlikely for the New York Yankees.
The Yankees got the gut-wrenching news Monday afternoon that star pitcher Gerrit Cole would need Tommy John surgery and will miss the entire 2025 season. It shouldn’t come as a total surprise, considering Cole missed the first two-and-a-half months of last season with an elbow injury, but it’s still a nightmare situation for a team with championship aspirations.
Most of all, Cole’s injury is a reminder of the tightrope the Yankees are walking this season. Having lost Juan Soto to the New York Mets in free agency, the Yankees set out this offseason to mitigate the loss of one megastar by acquiring several lesser stars. Their biggest move was signing former Atlanta Braves starting pitcher Max Fried to an eight-year, $218 million contract. They also traded for Milwaukee Brewers closer Devin Williams and Chicago Cubs outfielder Cody Bellinger.
It was a smart approach, designed to improve the depth of a team that relied so heavily last season on Soto and Aaron Judge. But the strategy also depends on having the team’s superstars—Judge and Cole—complemented by that depth. Without Cole at the top of the rotation, the Yankees don’t have pitching depth as much as they have a mediocre group of starters. That’s especially true with Luis Gil, the 2024 AL Rookie of the Year, sidelined for three months with a lat strain. Fangraphs projects them to have the 14th-best rotation in the majors without Cole and Gil. At the start of spring training, they ranked sixth.
Cole and Gil’s injuries place additional pressure on New York’s other recent pitching additions. Fried now projects to be the team’s best starter after a second All-Star selection last season, but the outlook behind him is a little murkier. Marcus Stroman was disappointing in 2024 in his first season with the Yankees—so much so, in fact, that he was left off the postseason roster. Carlos Rodón rebounded from a disastrous debut in pinstripes in 2023 to have a solid second season, but he still wasn’t the Cy Young candidate he was before his arrival in the Bronx. Behind those three free-agent signings, the Yankees have a couple of homegrown pitchers who will be relied on more heavily this season. Clarke Schmidt was excellent in 16 starts last season (2.85 ERA), but he missed more than three months with a lat strain. Will Warren got his first taste of the big leagues last year and was horrendous in six appearances (10.32 ERA).
There are a lot of question marks on that list of starters. It isn’t hard to envision how this season could totally go off the rails for the Yankees’ rotation. Rodón could continue to struggle with his command and with limiting contact, remaining a solidly average pitcher rather than the dominant force he was in his two seasons prior to joining the Yankees. Stroman could continue his second-half struggles from last season. Who knows what Gil will look like whenever he’s able to return? And New York is going to see many more innings from Warren than it previously bargained for.
Part of the strategy behind signing Fried and trading for Williams was the idea that the Yankees could make up for the loss of Soto’s offensive contributions by improving their pitching. A run prevented is as good as a run scored. But the offense is just as iffy as the pitching at this point. The Yankees will still be carried by Judge, no doubt, but there isn’t a second star-caliber bat behind him. Bellinger is as close as it gets, but he’s been staggeringly inconsistent ever since his MVP season in 2019. New York will instead hope for continued offensive progress from young shortstop Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisholm Jr., who was acquired at last year’s trade deadline. The team can’t count on Giancarlo Stanton to build on an impressive bounceback season in 2024. He’s dealing with injuries in both elbows that he called “severe” and could require season-ending surgery. Infielder DJ LeMahieu is also injured, dealing with a calf strain.
A lineup that centered around two of the best hitters in history last season will instead need to get the most it can out of 37-year-old Paul Goldschmidt, hope uber-prospect Jasson Domínguez can live up to the hype and cross its fingers that Bellinger wakes up on the right side of the bed.
It goes without saying that a Judge injury would completely sink the Yankees. He’s been mostly healthy throughout his career, playing an average of 134 games in his seven full-length seasons, but the risk of injury is always looming for a guy his size, especially since he turns 33 next month. The Yankees’ luck can’t be that bad, though, can it?
The best of Sports Illustrated
- Today’s Digital Cover is my story on one of the coolest venues in college basketball: Rose Hill Gym. It’s an arena that holds a special place in my heart and I’m really happy with how the story turned out. I also went to the gym a couple weeks ago to shoot a video where we got a behind-the-scenes tour.
- There’s a lot to digest from the first day of NFL free agency. The best way to catch up is with Conor Orr’s list of winners and losers.
- Matt Verderame also has an ongoing list grading all the major deals.
- It’s a huge week in college basketball and Pat Forde has everything you need to know about Championship Week as we count down the days to Selection Sunday.
- Tom Verducci spoke with Max Scherzer about the veteran’s radical idea to save starting pitching.
- In happier Yankees news, players are now allowed to have facial hair for the first time in nearly five decades. Stephanie Apstein asked a bunch of the players’ wives what they thought about the change in the policy.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | The Yankees’ Worst-Case Scenario Is Taking Shape.
