For starters, Gerrit Cole wasn’t entirely certain he was going to wake up from Tommy John surgery. He was not afraid of the possibility of dying on the table, exactly. “But you are aware of it,” he says.
As the 35-year-old Yankees ace passes the first anniversary of the procedure that kept him off the field for the entire 2025 season and could define the rest of his career, he thinks back to those days last March when he felt his elbow ache and his world shake—and the nearly 400 days since. For the first time, he is ready to talk publicly about how he got through that period.
