ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — For the first time this season, Carlos Rodon and the Yankees were finally in the same area code.
But the closest Rodon came to any kind of baseball activity was doing some agility drills on Friday morning at the Yankees’ player development complex in Tampa, under the watchful eye of Eric Cressey, the team’s director of player health and performance.
After leaving spring training five and a half weeks ago hoping that Rodon would return from his forearm muscle strain at some point in April, the Yankees returned to Florida this weekend with their $162 million left-hander seemingly no closer to helping them out, his progress now stalled by a tight back.
The latest plan of action, following a Thursday meeting with a back specialist, has Rodon receiving an injection akin to a cortisone shot early next week, manager Aaron Boone said Friday at Tropicana Field. The Yankees hope it will help solve the back issues that have been restricting Rodon since early April.
“It really sucks,” Rodon said Friday before the Yankees opened a series against the Rays. “I want to be pitching for the New York Yankees. I want to be pitching in this series and with the boys. I want to be competing. It’s hard to sit here and not be doing it and talking to [reporters].”
Doctors have told Rodon his back issues are a “chronic thing,” he said.
Rodon has not thrown the last two days and will not throw for an unspecified amount of time after receiving the injection, but the hope is that he can start building back up shortly after that — potentially for a late June return, though he and the Yankees have declined to put a timetable on it.
“It’s hard,” Rodon said, speaking with reporters for the first time since spring training. “I wanted to throw today, I wanted to throw [Thursday]. But that’s why we have the training staff we do have so I don’t do something stupid and make something worse.
“But yeah, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do that, if I wasn’t pushing [to throw].”
Asked if he could be back before July, Rodon said it was impossible to know.
“Whenever my body tells me I can throw and everyone comes to the agreeance I can throw, I’ll start throwing,” he said. “Whatever that ramp-up takes, that’s what we get to. … I can’t set a date for you. I would have thought I’d be pitching here for the club now.”
In the meantime, the Yankees have tried to survive the early going without Rodon and Luis Severino (strained lat), though Clarke Schmidt and Jhony Brito have struggled in their place.
Rodon reiterated that he is not feeling pain in his back, but more of a restriction when he throws that affects his command more than velocity.
“I’d throw a fastball and it would cut 2 feet or I’d throw a sinker — and I don’t throw sinkers,” Rodon said. “The release height, things are just not normal because I guess my body’s not letting me get to the positions I normally get to.”
Rodon only made one start in spring training, with the Yankees shutting him down a few days later after an MRI exam revealed what the team described as a “mild forearm muscle strain.” General manager Brian Cashman said at the time that “in a perfect world,” Rodon would return “sometime in April.”
Instead, Rodon was ramping back up from that injury and had advanced to facing hitters in a live batting practice session on April 5, he said, “and it was really good.” But while throwing in the following days, Rodon said he could tell his back “was just locked up.”
These days, Rodon’s forearm and shoulder are feeling good, he said. But it is his back that is keeping him from making progress toward returning to the Yankees, who entered Friday in last place in the AL East and nine games back of the first-place Rays.
“It’s hard to look back and say, ‘What if I was there?’ Well, I wasn’t,” Rodon said. “We’re here now and obviously I’m still not pitching. … It is May 5 and this is the New York Yankees. This team’s really good. There’s a little hole here, but I think it’s easy to climb out of.”