Yankees general manager Brian Cashman has long said that getting players back from long-term injuries can be as good as a trade deadline acquisition, and the team has to hope that Corey Kluber can prove that true sometime in August or September.
Kluber, who is on the 60-day injured list with a right shoulder injury, told the media on Sunday that he is “feeling good” as he goes through his throwing program, which just graduated to 90 feet on flat ground.
“I think anybody who goes through an injury would obviously like it to go quicker than it does, but you've just go to try to be smart about it and hopefully I get myself to a point where, when I do come back, we don't have anything that reoccurs,” Kluber said.
Kluber was 4-3 with a 3.04 ERA in 10 starts this season, including a no-hitter in Texas on May 19. However, he left his next start against Toronto on May 25 after three innings because he felt he couldn’t get loose, and he was placed on the injured list two days later with a subscapularis strain in his right shoulder.
After being shut down for a couple weeks, he began throwing from 60 feet in early June, and hasn’t felt anything in his shoulder in quite a while.
“I think that's the point of giving stuff time to heal and then being smart about the throwing program is, hopefully, you do it in an intelligent enough way that you don't feel stuff when the stuff is bothering you,” Kluber said.
Kluber isn’t eligible to be activated until at least July 25, but Yankees GM Brian Cashman has said it’s unlikely the right-hander will return until mid-August, perhaps even September. Kluber is confident he will return 100 percent, but hasn’t begun to think about when that might be.
“I haven’t looked that far ahead yet,” he said. “I think that I've had, I guess, too much experience with this the last couple the last couple of years. But I think that, for me, if I start looking ahead to that, I don’t do the best job of trying to attack that day's work the best I can and start looking ahead too far. So just trying to take it a day at a time and do the best I can with what the schedule is that day."
This is indeed the third straight year Kluber has had to rehab a major injury; after pitching 200 or more innings in five straight seasons from 2014-18, Kluber made just seven starts in 2019 thanks to a broken forearm and then an oblique injury suffered during his rehab, and last season, the former two-time Cy Young pitched just one inning for the Rangers before muscle tear in his right shoulder ended his season.
Follow Lou DiPietro on Twitter: @LouDiPietroWFAN
Follow WFAN on Social Media
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Twitch
