Roger Rubin: Yankees need their starting rotation to pick up the pace
Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodon reacts against the Chicago White Sox at Yankee Stadium on June 17, 2026. Credit: Howard Simmons
The Yankees were beset by a confounding assortment of maladies that led to the seven-game losing streak they finally snapped Friday night with a 5-2 win over the Twins at the Stadium.
None of those maladies has been a bigger head-scratcher than why a starting rotation that had been the club’s biggest strength has struggled.
There had been poor play in the field, but one could have pointed to the positional adjustments made to cope with the absences of third baseman Ryan McMahon and centerfielder Trent Grisham — both returned Friday — as culprits. The batting order had a slash line of .137/.191/.230 during the streak, but an offensive drought can be expected when three-time American League MVP Aaron Judge is out.
The starting rotation, however, is a different story. The Yankees have been one of the two best teams in the AL — along with Tampa Bay — largely because of their starting pitching. Yet every member of it has been scuffling, and that started even before the losing streak.
The situation took on an even worse turn Friday with Carlos Rodon going on the 15-day injured list with left elbow inflammation. Rodon, who had come back relatively well from offseason surgery to remove loose bodies and shave a bone spur in the joint, said he hadn’t been recovering from starts well for a while. When he tried to play catch Wednesday in preparation for his scheduled start on Saturday, the elbow “was not really giving in to throwing,” he said, so he was sent for an MRI exam that revealed the inflammation.
The positive from it is that there is no UCL damage, and he said, “Any time you get an MRI on your elbow . . . and it’s not your UCL, it’s a pretty big exhale.”
Rodon will get a PRP injection and will be restricted from throwing for up to a week.
The Yankees’ starting pitching looked like the closest approximation to a sure thing for a long while. Now it’s littered with question marks.
Yes, Cam Schlittler has been the odds-on choice to start the All-Star Game for the AL even though he’s been hit hard in two straight outings. But Max Fried still looks weeks away from returning from the left elbow bone bruise that sidelined him in mid-May, and now Rodon is out indefinitely.
Will Warren? He hasn’t recorded a win nor made it through six innings since May 31. Ryan Weathers? He is 1-4 with a 5.81 ERA in his past six starts.
And then there’s Gerrit Cole, who came back from a 53-minute rain delay to finish five innings of two-run pitching on Friday.
Cole was expected to have highs and lows as he returned from the Tommy John surgery that cost him his 2025 season. When he pitched 12 2⁄3 scoreless innings in his first two starts, it appeared he would defy those expectations, but the five before Friday night were more in line with them as he pitched 25 innings to a 6.12 ERA.
Against the Twins, Cole was a real soldier through his 88-pitch effort. He threw four eight-to-10-pitch bullpens during the delay to stay sharp and was adamant about going back out for the fifth.
“I was going to pull him after four, and he was like not having it,” Aaron Boone said.
“I definitely wasn’t coming out,” Cole said. “We’re in a rut. We needed this win today and I just felt like . . . you got to do hard stuff in this league sometimes [and] sometimes it’s not fun. It’s not fun to sit around for an hour and 20 minutes throwing bullpens, but it’s what was needed.”
He wasn’t exactly efficient and gave up some hard hits, including a 403-foot opposite-field homer to Kody Clemens in the first, but he didn’t issue a walk and fanned seven.
“You’re going to have ebbs and flows where some guys have a couple tough turns through the rotation, even the really good ones,” Boone said of the rotation’s struggles. “My expectation is that they’re going to be good for us moving forward, but these things happen a little bit. The end of the day, we got to go out and execute, and I think they’re in a position to do that.”
Rookie righthander Brendan Beck will make his first major-league start in place of Rodon on Saturday.
Teams tend to go as their starting pitching goes. In the previous 14 games — as the Yankees slid from 3 1⁄2 games up on the Rays to four games back entering Friday — their starters went 3-8 with a 4.39 ERA and averaged only 14 outs per game. During the losing streak, they were 0-5 with a 5.34 ERA that ranked 12th in the AL in that span.
“It comes down to going out there and executing at a high level, and you know we’re going to do a better job of that,” Boone said, “certainly better than we’ve done this last week.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
