Gerrit Cole is set to return to the Yankees on Friday, a little more than a year after his last big league start and after a recovery that has taken him through elbow discomfort, surgery and a lost season. Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters on May 19, 2026, that Cole will be activated from the 15-day injured list to start the game.
For the Yankees, that is a major turn in a rotation that has spent much of the past two seasons trying to hold itself together without its long-time ace. Cole is coming back after spending 2025 recovering from Tommy John surgery, and Friday will be his first start in the majors since 2024.
The numbers behind the return help explain why the Yankees have waited. Cole has a 3.18 ERA in almost 2,000 big league innings, and in 12 seasons he has finished with an ERA above 3.88 only once. From 2013 to 2023, he logged at least 116 innings in every full season and reached the 200-inning mark six times. He won the Cy Young Award in 2023, then opened 2024 on the injured list with elbow discomfort before coming back to post a 3.41 ERA over 95 innings.
He was even better when the games mattered most. Cole put up a 2.17 ERA in five postseason starts in 2024 as the Yankees reached the World Series, then watched them lose to the Dodgers. The hope in the Bronx was that he would carry that momentum into 2025, but the elbow discomfort returned in spring training and he had surgery in March.
That left Max Fried to step into the ace role. The Yankees signed Fried before last season, and he gave them exactly what they needed with a 2.86 ERA over 32 starts while the club went 94-68. But Fried recently went on the injured list with a bone bruise in his left elbow, another setback that has complicated the Yankees’ rotation picture.
Cole had been rehabbing for a few weeks and was slated for one more rehab start, but the Yankees decided not to wait any longer. He went at least 4 1/3 innings in all six of his rehab outings, posted a 4.66 ERA overall and allowed three earned runs over his two most recent games while throwing 10 1/3 innings. That work was enough for the club to bring him back now, even if the results were uneven.
The rest of the rotation has been doing damage control. The Yankees had been getting solid results from Fried, Will Warren, Cam Schlittler and Ryan Weathers, with all four carrying ERAs under 3.60. Carlos Rodón, by contrast, has a 5.63 ERA in two starts after opening the season on the injured list while recovering from elbow surgery, and Clarke Schmidt is still working back from Tommy John surgery performed in July.
What makes the Cole move especially striking is how long the Yankees have been waiting to see him again. He and Fried have technically been on the same team without ever being on the active roster together, a strange overlap for a club that signed Fried to survive Cole’s absence and is now trying to piece together the rotation just as Cole returns. The Yankees know what they are getting in Cole. The harder part may be making sure they have enough around him to keep him on the mound.
