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.
