Gerrit Cole injury puts onus on Yankees’ offense

The Yankees can still rake. We’ve seen that all spring. We saw that, most notably, during one of the most enjoyable spring-training baseball games you’ll ever see, a 9-8 win over the Braves at Steinbrenner Field a few days ago. Even if Aaron Judge isn’t right for Opening Day — though it now seems like he ought to be — it feels like the Yankees’ offense is trending as it should.

So there’s that.

But there is no minimizing how brutal the effect of losing Gerrit Cole is — whether it’s a month, whether it’s two, whether it’s longer. Cole isn’t just one of the two or three best pitchers on the planet, though that’s a big part of it. Every fifth day, Cole demands the ball, he throws the hell out of it, he leaves a large portion of his soul on the pitcher’s mound and often Aaron Boone needs to bring a court order with him to the mound to get the ball away from him.

What happens every fifth day isn’t just excellence of the first order — excellence that was finally recognized with hardware last year when he won the AL Cy Young Award. It’s something else. It’s something visceral. Too often the past few years we’ve seen too many Yankees who come up lacking when it comes to the basic task of competing. There is always a lot of talent in the room. There isn’t always a surplus of grit and grime and grinding.

Cole provided enough for half the clubhouse most days. He cares, deeply, in a way we aren’t always sure nine-figure conglomerate players care any more. And that rubs off, even on days when he’s merely cheering or charting pitches and not throwing them. Cole picks his teammates up on the days he pitches and perks them up on all the other days.

So that’s what gets on an airplane bound for Los Angeles, a date with Dr. Neal ElAttrache on his itinerary now, his next start not likely to happen until May, maybe June. It’s more than just an arm that heads west. It’s a large chunk of the Yankees’ soul.

“Gerrit’s as smart as they come,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said Wednesday, after the Yankees lost to the Red Sox, 9-4, in Tampa. “He’s just trying to process all of the information as it comes in, and obviously having necessary conversations with our trainers, our doctors, his people, his family. So I think he’s still in the information-gathering portion too, of, ‘What’s the final diagnosis here? What’s the course of action?’ ”

When Cole’s elbow started to betray him this week, when the doom first started to creep into Steinbrenner Field and dominate every conversation, the season at once did a full stop. More than ever, it’s fair to wonder if the Yankees will act like the Yankees of lore and write a check to plug the leak. There are still two splendid options out there after all — old friend Jordan Montgomery and the other Cy Young winner from 2023, Blake Snell.

If you think — as I do — that the Yankees should’ve already welcomed one of those two free agents into the fold, this doesn’t change your mind a bit. The rotation has scads of question marks and that was with Cole available to lead the charge every five games. Without him as the bell-cow ace, everyone else moves up a spot, which is less than ideal. Snell, especially, would ease much of the angst even if by all indications you’re not getting near the team-wide influencer you have with Cole.

If you didn’t already think that, though — and their distance well away from Yankees camp is the loudest indication that’s the Yankees’ thinking — it’s hard to believe they should change course now. After all, the Yankees have already offered Snell, though it was far below the value Scott Boras believes he’s worth. And let’s just say that Cole’s status probably didn’t inspire Boras to go into the discount business.

At this point, it seems everyone is approaching this the same: with about as much cautious optimism as the law allows when you hear the words “elbow” and “ElAttrache” in the same sentence.

At this point, it seems the Yankees will look to out-hit teams, which they should be able to do many nights with the Judge/Soto combo sitting in the middle of the lineup every game, and to hope the rotation can make it to whenever Cole’s return date is.

Of course, the Yankees also hoped they could outlast Judge’s collision with the Dodger Stadium fence last year and found out different. That injury, like this one, involved not only vacuuming an All-Star player’s production out of the lineup, but siphoning an essential element of the Yankees’ daily DNA, too. They paid for that. Maybe they’ll pay for this. Or maybe it would just make more sense to pay for another pitcher, something they should have done in the first place.