Perhaps the best news for the Yankees on Friday night is that CC Sabathia is going to start working out on a treadmill fairly soon.
Hey, you lose 6-1 to the Twins, who slugged three home runs, and you take what you can get.
“He is better and he’s going to start some more movement,” Joe Girardi said of Sabathia. “You know they have all these fancy treadmills and things and I think he’s going to start doing some of that.”
The Yankees’ workhorse left-hander was placed on the 15-day disabled list May 11 with right knee inflammation, an ailment that since has been treated with stem-cell treatment injections from noted surgeon Dr. James Andrews. It is an ailment that figures to keep Sabathia sidelined into July. He has done pool work and figures to be headed for offseason surgery.
So, yeah, upcoming treadmill work can be viewed very positively. Sabathia needed to be pain free before resuming any activity on his knee. From here, Girardi said there is no real time frame for Sabathia.
“It’s up in the air,” Girardi said. “He hasn’t played catch or thrown a bullpen [session]. He’s still a ways away. It’s a step in the right direction.”
So the rotation that had loomed as a Yankees strength at the season’s outset has become a crazy-quilt landscape with David Phelps, Chase Whitley and Friday’s starter and loser, Vidal Nuno, trying to plug the gaps in the pitching landscape, which has been decimated by injuries to Sabathia, Ivan Nova and Michael Pineda.