NEW YORK — Carlos Rodon is close. The left-hander, sidelined since late June with elbow inflammation, is scheduled to make his first rehab start Saturday with Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. The Yankees plan calls for him to throw roughly 50 pitches, or about three innings, for the RailRiders.
From there, the path is mapped. Manager Aaron Boone said Rodon may make one more rehab start, with two now the more likely number. Either way, the Yankees intend to activate him before he is fully stretched out and build the rest of his pitch count at the major league level.
Boone explained how the club will manage those early outings, leaning on a tandem approach rather than asking Rodon to carry a full workload right away.
“We’ll definitely, probably piggyback [Rodon] at some point,” the Yankees skipper said.
The schedule makes the strategy workable. The Yankees have seven idle days left on the regular-season calendar and only one stretch of 10 straight games without an off day. With five healthy starters already in the rotation, the long-standing expectation is that Ryan Weathers or Will Warren shifts to the bullpen once Rodon is back, leaving one of them stretched out to piggyback.
The Yankees ran the same playbook with Max Fried, who made just one rehab start before jumping to the big league rotation and throwing 57 pitches in his first outing back.
Rodon says his elbow is finally behaving
Rodon, 33, initially hoped to miss little time. Instead, the absence stretched past a month. He pointed to the treatment plan, a series of injections that complicated his throwing schedule, as the reason the timeline dragged.
“I always try to get back as quick as I can,” theYankees ace said. “I feel like anybody in this situation would. I wouldn’t say anything delayed me. We just had a plan with the injections, and when you’re scheduling injections and trying to throw in between them, it kind of makes it harder to figure out when you can throw, when you can’t.”
The most encouraging part of his update was the simplest. Rodon, whose season began late after October surgery to remove loose bodies and shave a bone spur in the same elbow, said the joint no longer bothers him.
“It’s been really good,” the Yankees pitcher added. “It feels normal.”
He was 4-2 with a 3.30 ERA over nine starts before the inflammation shut him down. The Yankees star also wondered aloud whether the forced rest might leave him fresher for the stretch run, after a 2025 in which he made a league-best 33 regular-season starts plus two more in October.
“I hope so,” Rodon said. “Right now it feels that way. Obviously, we’ll see how it goes.”
The confusing part is Cody Bellinger’s hamstring
If Rodon’s return is coming into focus, Cody Bellinger’s is doing the opposite. The All-Star Yankees outfielder took part in agility drills in the Yankee Stadium outfield again Friday, and by the eye test the work went smoothly. That is the part that looks like progress.
The complication is what Bellinger himself has said. Even as the drills go well, he acknowledged this week that he is still feeling the effects of the strain in his hamstring, according to MLB insider Bryan Hoch. Clean sessions on the outside, lingering discomfort on the inside, and no clear answer on when the two line up.
That gap is why the Yankees are holding a deliberate pace. Bellinger has been on the injured list since July 26 with a left hamstring strain, an injury projected at four to six weeks when it happened. The agility work marks a real step, but full game readiness still sits some distance off, and the residual sensation keeps a firm return date out of reach.
The bat is the reason the wait stings. Before the strain, Bellinger was hitting .259 with a .350 on-base percentage, a .420 slugging mark, 11 home runs and 53 RBIs in 102 games. A former MVP and World Series champion from his Los Angeles Dodgers years, he gives the Yankees two-way value in an outfield that has been stretched thin by injuries.
The Yankees entered the weekend at 65-51, second in the AL East and four games behind the first-place Tampa Bay Rays, while holding a wild-card position and staying just ahead of a surging Red Sox club. Every start and every healthy bat carries weight from here.
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