Yanks Mag: Make it Count

Calendars exist to count, or rather, to let us count. They help us tick off moments and look forward to others. Day by day by day, the calendar reminds us of what’s ahead and what’s behind, taunting at once while offering hope the next day.

Baseball, more than any other sport, has always been singularly bound to the calendar. The “Boys of Summer” get things underway in Spring Training, the teams having been assembled, in part, at the Winter Meetings. The everlasting goal? To make it to the Fall Classic.

It’s like life in that way. All of us, from our first moments in school, have been servants to the calendar, even if it is, at times, more theoretical than literal. Summer unofficially begins on Memorial Day, long before the solstice, then ends a few weeks earlier than the equinox as we all enjoy one last beach trip on the first Monday in September.

From winter counts in Native American cultures to the ancient stone formations found around the world, there is ample evidence that, as a people, we’re simply obsessed with the passage of time. We count days because we always have, and because we have no choice. We’re all on a pitch count of sorts, playing out the string to the best of our abilities before the great manager in the sky comes and takes the ball from our hands.

But there’s also no better -- really, no other -- way to track the moments that constitute a life. It’s how we know that Gerrit Cole was 7,576 days old when the Pirates selected him with the first overall pick in the 2011 MLB Draft, which came 1,096 days after the Yankees tried wooing him with the 28th overall pick in 2008. It’s how we can track that Cole finally pitched in a World Series game 2,324 days after his big league debut, or how we can state with confidence that his Yankees World Series debut -- not counting the night that he, at 4,075 days old, held a now-famous sign at Game 7 in 2001 -- came 1,830 days later. And it’s how we note, perhaps ruefully, that his next start, five days later, would be the last time we’d see the Yankees’ ace on the mound for quite some time.

Some of this is silly, some meaningful. Most of it, we don’t notice as it’s happening; despite our best intentions, the passage of time often becomes something to look back on rather than experience. But it was hard not to appreciate the joy on Yankees manager Aaron Boone’s face this past May 19, when he told the reporters assembled for his pregame gaggle that Cole, the ace who had been toiling behind the scenes and pitching in Minor League rehab games as he worked his way back from March 2025 Tommy John surgery, “will pitch Friday. For us.” It would be easy to start the count there, to imagine Cole back on the mound, dominating again, an ace in his element. But Boone, Cole and the faces throughout the Yankees’ clubhouse understood the truth: that the story lay in the days between Oct. 30, 2024, and May 22, 2026, a count that would reach 569 days before Cole was back where he belonged.

“He’s one of the greatest to ever do it,” said Yankees captain Aaron Judge, who played behind Cole during the lion’s share of the starts the ace made from the moment he signed as a Yankee on Dec. 18, 2019, until the last game of the 2024 World Series, 1,778 days later. From that point on, it was just waiting; or, at least, it looked like waiting to those of us on the outside. In reality, of course, rehab is a nonstop ordeal, filled with boxes to check and mile markers to pass. It takes so long, leaving us little to do but count. Day by day by day by day …

But the pitcher that emerged from the rehab was a stranger in some significant ways. “Gerrit Cole pitches tomorrow!” said Cody Bellinger, sounding more like a fan with hard-to-procure tickets than a guy who had ostensibly been Cole’s teammate for 521 days at that point. The right-hander would take the mound slightly older, wiser and somehow stronger, even employing a noticeably different pitching windup. Whatever it looked like, everyone was ready to see Cole on the mound.

“It feels like it’s been a long time,” fellow starter Will Warren said a few hours before Cole’s return. “He probably feels like it was a little longer than I do.”

***

Austin Wells debuted on Sept. 1, 2023, and caught 19 games as the Yankees played out the string of a postseason-less campaign. While he was behind the plate for starters Carlos Rodón, Luis Severino, Clarke Schmidt, Michael King and even Luke Weaver, not once did he catch a Cole start. Perhaps that’s because the pitcher was on his way to winning the AL Cy Young Award and didn’t need to help break in a rookie backstop. Maybe it has something to do with the way Wells’ catching acumen was perceived at the time, when scouts were calling him a bat-first (and maybe even bat-only) player.

A lot changes when you’re gone for a year and a half, though. These days, Wells’ ability behind the plate is respected throughout the league, and the now-veteran catcher plays a vital role in the meetings in which batterymates plan their outings. As Cole’s return drew near, Wells was pleased to see a familiar scowl creeping back. “As he’s gotten closer, in general, I think that he’s been more and more intense, more focused, for sure,” Wells said. “More like himself, to be honest.

“The closer he’s been getting, you see Gerrit Cole be Gerrit Cole. Because for the longest time, he wasn’t himself.”

Cole knows that a competitor unable to compete risks losing some of his self-worth. And while he was around the team for much of the rehab, able to support his teammates and offer counsel, there’s something more than metaphysical about being reinserted into a five-man, five-day rotation, an entirely different form of presence. “I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be,” he said a few days after his first start back. “Just doing my job and getting to play regularly now at this level and sharpen my skills, the process is very familiar, and it just feels right.”

With some players, especially in a sports culture that sometimes overemphasizes stoicism, it can be hard to gauge what “right” looks like. Not so with Cole. As the pitcher moved about the clubhouse ahead of his return to action on May 22, the excitement from the players around him and even the assembled media members was plain to see. Yet for all the energy in the room, little felt more appropriate than seeing Cole so … surly. In a room full of glee and an almost Christmas-morning spirit, Cole was giving Ebenezer Scrooge vibes.

He was back.

“It’s a different animal,” Warren said of the game-day version of Cole, the one some teammates had yet to witness. “Just seeing the competitive side of Gerrit come out is going to be fun to watch. Cam [Schlittler] hasn’t experienced that until tonight. I’m like, ‘Hey, don’t talk to him today. He’s pitching today. He’ll bite your freaking head off, bro. The rest of us are really cool, but don’t do that.’ It’s exciting, and obviously I’ll be right there next to Cam in the dugout watching it all happen.”

For all his skills, for all his abilities, Cole is a competitor above all else, and for 569 days, he was unable to lock horns with anything but the calendar. It was a sometimes-torturous ordeal for a guy who thrives on total emotional dedication to the task at hand. The rehab checklist is detailed and precise, and Cole didn’t skip so much as a single step, but there’s a massive difference between staring down a list of weight-room chores and toeing the rubber against the big leagues’ best hitters.

Schmidt has also spent the last year rehabbing from elbow reconstruction. He’s a few months behind Cole and can view his ace teammate as a North Star for his own recovery. What he noticed, working alongside Cole, was a guy suffering through the brutality of monotony. “I know, seeing the behind the scenes, the ins and outs and the dark days, and how it gets,” Schmidt said. “We already were close, but just to be able to have this unique experience where you can bounce unique experiences off each other … misery loves company, so it was good to have him with me.”

Cole’s outward appearance would seem to indicate that he was still plenty miserable even when the process reached its apparent conclusion (a relevant distinction from an actual terminus, considering that the goal for a pitcher of Cole’s caliber isn’t simply to return to a big league mound, but to reemerge as the dominant, elite force that fans remember). The game face is certainly intimidating, but it was a welcome sight around the room. As Cole moved ever closer to his return, his presence was a constant, other than the nights when he would dispatch to a Yankees affiliate a few hours away for a rehab start. As May 22 approached, the days ticking toward the final mark of 569, it was clear that he was ready for a new, external opponent. It wasn’t about his body anymore. It was, for at least that first night, about the Tampa Bay Rays.

Perhaps strangely, though, pitching coach Matt Blake and even Cole acknowledged one different part of his process. Nobody understands pitching metrics better than the Yankees’ ace, and for much of his career, he has been the loudest voice in the pitching meetings. Maybe it was a function of having been away from the day-to-day grind for so long, maybe he questioned his ability to actually know the hitters as well as he had 569 days earlier, or maybe it was that he only had so much emotional bandwidth ahead of a night that he would eventually call “almost like a second debut,” but Cole was more student than teacher in the hours leading up to his start against Tampa Bay.

“Historically, he spent a handful of hours before the game with very detailed notes,” Blake said. “And I think he’s relinquished that process a little bit to kind of open up the process to the coaching staff and the catchers to provide him some detail. ‘What do you guys think about him? What should I do?’ A lot more questions coming in than answers this time, which I thought was unique.”

“I did less work than I typically do because I just didn’t think it was going to pay a lot of dividends,” Cole said. “I wanted to have an idea, but at the same time just kind of adapt while I was out there. So, it wasn’t too detailed beforehand, and I just left a lot of room for, We’ll see how things look, and we’ll talk about it from there.”

If something in the air was different, it wasn’t totally surprising. Cole is different. He looks different, and he pitches different. As he spent much of his time in the weight room during the months rehabbing, unable to ignore that his body was growing older while his statistics held static, Cole noticed that he was hitting personal bests in strength metrics, something not a whole lot of 35-year-old pitchers can say. At the same time, he was rebuilding his delivery, adding in a retro-style windup that evokes memories of Ron Guidry. It’s hard to tell how much that stuff means on the mound, but it’s also impossible to ignore that, in his final rehab outing, his fastball reached 99.6 mph.

If so much was changing, both physically and emotionally, it was incumbent on those around Cole to get him back to the spot where he thrived for so long. However he approached the 569 days leading up to his start, May 22 against the Rays didn’t have to be about any of that. He just had to be the best version of Gerrit Cole available on that day. So, Wells tried to keep things as simple as possible.

“I just told him,” the catcher said of their chat before the game, “‘Let’s go sling the rock around.’”

***

It was a random moment, the middle of the third inning on June 3 against Cleveland -- Cole’s third big league start since the surgery -- when the Yankees’ scoreboard team really seemed to understand the assignment. The start represented the first time Cole struggled since the fifth inning of Game 5 of the 2024 World Series 581 days earlier, but there were few frowns among the thousands of Yankees fans in the house after Trent Grisham raced down a long Travis Bazzana drive to record the final out of the inning.

It was then that someone with a sense for the moment cued up the Foo Fighters’ 1997 hit, “Everlong,” released when Cole was 2,536 days old, as the pitcher walked to the dugout.

If everything could ever be this real forever … If anything could ever be this good again …

Cole gave up three home runs that day but was generally OK. He had returned against Tampa Bay with a very good outing -- six shutout innings of two-hit ball, three walks being the only frustrations to speak of -- then dominated the Royals to the tune of 10 punchouts in 6 2/3 scoreless frames on May 27. The pitch shapes looked good, the velocity was impressive, and the whole package looked a lot like Gerrit Cole. “Maybe the first game was a little appetizer, and that was the main course right there. That was surgical,” Boone said after the outing in Kansas City. “I’m not surprised. I can’t sit here and say I’m surprised that Gerrit Cole has gone out and pitched really well his first two times out. That said, it’s only two times out. But I can’t say I’m surprised by that.

“But impressed? Absolutely.”

Cole wasn’t going to be perfect all season; he wasn’t perfect at UCLA, he wasn’t perfect when he was a young dominant stud for the Pirates, he wasn’t perfect when he was pitching the Astros to the 2019 World Series, and he wasn’t perfect when he won the Cy Young Award as a Yankee in 2023. Even the greatest competitors know better than to chase unrealistic goals.

“I expect to execute pitches,” Cole said after the second start. “I don’t necessarily expect to not give up any runs.”

Yankees fans have come to expect the impossible from Cole, though, and in the time he was gone, you could forgive them for recalling times when everything could ever be that real, when anything could ever be that good. During his introductory press conference -- which came 85 days before MLB suspended Spring Training due to the pandemic that would shake the country and (less importantly) make it impossible for Yankees fans to watch their new ace pitch in person -- Cole echoed Billie Jean King’s mantra that “pressure is a privilege,” and fans have lapped up the opportunity to watch their pitcher embrace that honor.

Ironically, though, as Cole’s return approached, it became clear that some of those closest to him have less experience than the fans in aligning themselves with the right-hander. Max Fried was signed before the 2025 season in hopes that he, Cole and Rodón would form a peerless 1-2-3 punch atop the rotation; neither Cole nor Fried -- who went on the injured list with a left elbow bone bruise in mid-May -- has yet to appear on the Yankees’ 26-man roster for one of the other’s starts. Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt, José Caballero, Ryan McMahon, Brent Headrick, Fernando Cruz, Camilo Doval and David Bednar -- more than half of the Yankees players who appeared in the May 22 game -- weren’t on the roster on Oct. 30, 2024. Warren can talk about Schlittler not really knowing what to expect from Cole’s demeanor on a start day, but the young right-hander was far from alone in that regard.

Jake Bird became a Yankee on July 31, 2025 -- 295 days before Cole’s return to action. From that moment, he was, at least in theory, teammates with Gerrit Cole. But the reliever looked forward to Cole’s return for more than just competitive reasons. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him pitch in person before,” Bird said. “He’s one of the all-time greats, so it’s going to be really cool to experience, watch and then maybe throw behind him. I’ve never played with a guy of his caliber before, so it’s going to be cool to see, and maybe take a little peek in so I can learn something.”

It makes you question what it means to be a teammate. It has to be more than just having lockers in the same room and wearing the same hat, no? Teammates play games together, and Bird -- like so many current Yankees -- had never played a game with Cole.

So much had changed since the surgery, and not just in terms of personnel. The night before Cole’s final pre-Tommy John start, Wells and Anthony Volpe both homered in what would prove to be one of the last feel-good moments of a 2024 season full of them. At the time, the two were still can’t-miss prospects destined for certain greatness. Warren was nothing but a question mark who had shown little in his brief big league stints to that point. Outside of Baseball America copy editors enduring desperate bouts of night sweats, the name Cam Schlittler was relatively unknown.

Still, whatever their own individual baseball stories, there’s no doubting the reverence that teammates feel for the pitcher. Jazz Chisholm Jr. compares him to a Zack Greinke type, uber-intelligent and capable of talking hitting as easily as he does pitching. Blake enjoyed the fact that during the rehab, Cole was able to benefit from a bit more distance, watching his team play from afar at times. That offered a perspective that sometimes is missed from the dugout, and the coach reveled in the ways that Cole could impart the things he noticed to the Yankees pitchers. But even beyond the details, the newest Yankees, the ones who never played with Cole, got to watch a master work, even when the work wasn’t the type fans could see.

“Everything you could think of that could be considered a really small thing, he takes very seriously and tries to nail that detail,” Bird said, “which is really impressive for a guy that was a No. 1 overall pick, a guy that’s been amazing since high school and college, that sometimes you might think, Maybe it’s just talent. But he’s really hyper-focused on all the details, too.”

Schlittler probably didn’t need to be warned about Cole’s snarling game-day persona. He might be a young pitcher, but Schlittler knows the game, and he has gotten to know Cole well over the past year. The 35-year-old had been a helpful mentor as Schlittler got his feet wet and developed into a frontline starter, teaching the young pitcher the ins and outs of preparation and pitch selection and so much more. Fairly or not, Schlittler learned enough to join Yankees fans in chasing the ever-long sensation of things staying real and good forever for Cole.

“I expect him to be great,” Schlittler said.

***

Baseball fans can find symmetry in the most unlikely spots. Perhaps it’s fitting for at least one contingent of die-hards, then, that Cole’s return came on the night it did.

For millennia, Jews have been counting days and years, with a calendar now marking its 5,786th cycle. Their religious holidays are tied to the seasons, with a lunar calendar that adds a 13th month seven out of every 19 years to make sure that holidays meant to be in spring remain there. And every year, starting on the second night of the Passover holiday, Jews begin a process of counting 49 nights -- seven weeks -- until the holiday of Shavuot. It is a nightly ritual, one quick prayer to acknowledge another day between two poles, spanning the celebration of the exodus from Egypt to the revelation at Sinai. The Shavuot festival even takes its name from the Hebrew word for week -- shavua -- and is known as the Feast of Weeks.

Gerrit Cole stepped back onto a big league mound one night after Jews finished their annual count. Theirs was 49 days, his 569, each steeped in its own forms of meaning and observance, each ending with a relevant celebration.

Sometimes when you start counting, you don’t want to stop; other times, the end is all you care about. On May 22, it was time for Yankees fans to stop looking ahead toward Cole’s return. It was time for beat writers to stop asking Boone for daily updates on the ace’s status. It was time for Gerrit Cole to stop marking a brutally precise checklist and instead go back to being Gerrit Cole.

In Yankees world, it was time for the tallying to reverse itself. There are 154 days between May 22 and Oct. 23, the night the 2026 World Series begins. So even as Cole is done counting days until his return, now everyone is back to doing what they have long craved: counting on Cole.

It’s a familiar sensation for Yankees fans, one that was dearly missing for 569 days.

“A long road,” the Yankees’ ace said of his journey out of baseball’s cruelest exile. “And yet at some point tonight, it was almost like I’d never left.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the July 2026 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.