Today the Pittsburgh Pirates placed Gerrit Cole on the 15-day disabled list with shoulder fatigue. Cole came to the Pirates after his last start, while playing catch the next day, saying that the shoulder didn’t feel right and felt a little tired. They originally had plans to skip him, then decided to take more precautions, according to Neal Huntington.
“We give Gerrit a ton of credit for just making us aware that it didn’t feel right, just felt a little tired,” Huntington said. “We talked about, do we just skip him this time, try to have him come back his next time. And at the end of the day we thought it was probably better to be aggressive with it now and give him a little bit of down time and get that fatigue out of it.”
If all goes well, Huntington said that Cole will return right after his time on the DL is up. His placement was backdated to June 4th, which means he’s eligible to come off the DL on June 19th. Huntington said that the teams have done structural tests, and that all signs point to fatigue.
“All the tests that we’ve done so far have confirmed shoulder fatigue and Gerrit feels good with it,” Huntington said. “We feel good with it and we’ll see how the treatments progress and how he responds.”
As for the rest of the rotation, there was some concern with Charlie Morton being pushed back a day, which seemed strange since he was originally scheduled for today’s start. Huntington said that this was about getting Jeff Locke out without too long of a break, while giving Morton an extra day of rest.
Tim started Pirates Prospects in 2009 from his home in Virginia, which was 40 minutes from where Pedro Alvarez made his pro debut in Lynchburg. That year, the Lynchburg Hillcats won the Carolina League championship, and Pirates Prospects was born from Tim's reporting along the way. The site has grown over the years to include many more writers, and Tim has gone on to become a credentialed MLB reporter, producing Pirates Prospects each year, and will publish his 11th Prospect Guide this offseason. He has also served as the Pittsburgh Pirates correspondent for Baseball America since 2019. Behind the scenes, Tim is an avid music lover, and most of the money he gets paid to run this site goes to vinyl records.
All reports on Taillon were initially positive….I’m crossing my fingers on this.
Locke will be fine, he should have been on the staff in the first place. If they lose Cole longer than 15 days, they got problems. Liriano & Morton better step up and get their control in order right now.
Hopefully Cutch’s knee is okay, that’s definitely not the way I want to see Polanco come up.
Locke pitched his butt off today. Too bad the bats didn’t give him anything in support. Cole wouldn’t have won either, unless he could have driven in a couple of runs.
agree on the bats, but it’s too bad the umps had a worse day. Gave them a run and took one away.
yup, as much as I hate saying external factors hurt a teams chances, today is an example of it happening. After the game, Lucroy even said the pitch Martin struck out on was clearly a ball.