A few hours into the Winter Meetings, the New York Yankees look like a team sorting through a long to-do list with a clock ticking somewhere in the background. You can sense it in the way they’ve been poking around the pitching market. You can hear it in the tone of every update trickling out of Nashville.
And you can see it in the depth chart, which already has more red flags than anyone in the organization would like to admit. This isn’t mid-July triage. It’s December, and the Yankees already know they’re short on arms.
Injuries Leading the Conversation
The loss of Devin Williams to the Mets last week put an early dent in the bullpen, but the more pressing concern is at the top of the staff. The Yankees have re-signed Ryan Yarbrough to give themselves a stabilizer, but it’s the names behind him that make the front office uneasy.
Bryan Hoch dropped the latest set of updates, and they read like a grocery list of absentees. Carlos Rodon is penciled in for a late April or May return. Gerrit Cole has a broader window, somewhere between May and June. Shortstop Anthony Volpe won’t be back in April either.
Even if none of those timelines sound catastrophic on their own, stack them together and the picture becomes clearer. The Yankees will open the season without their ace, without their most reliable workhorse from 2025, and without their starting shortstop.
What Rodon and Cole’s Timelines Mean
Rodon’s situation is both encouraging and inconvenient. His 3.09 ERA across 195.1 innings last season reminded everyone what he looks like when healthy, but elbow surgery to remove a bone spur is still elbow surgery. Missing two to three weeks of the regular season is manageable. Missing a month or more is something different, especially when the rotation is already thin.
Cole is the wild card. Spring Tommy John surgery knocked him down, and the Yankees won’t rush the reigning backbone of their pitching staff. Getting him back sometime in the first half is the goal, but the difference between a May return and a late June one could shape the entire AL East race. When Cole pitches, the Yankees operate with a different level of confidence. When he doesn’t, the margin for error shrinks quickly.
Volpe and Schmidt Add More Layers
Volpe’s May target date is another wrinkle. It doesn’t touch the rotation, but it forces the Yankees to consider how they structure the roster early on. Defense up the middle matters even more when the pitching staff is patchwork.
Clarke Schmidt didn’t appear in Hoch’s update, but he lingers in the background as a possible late-season reinforcement if his Tommy John rehab stays on schedule. That’s helpful for August, not April. And April is where the Yankees could find themselves leaning heavily on Max Fried, Cam Schlittler, Will Warren, Luis Gil, Yarbrough, and untested rookie Elmer Rodriguez. That’s a mix of talent, hope, and crossed fingers.
Why the Yankees Need Another Starter Now
This is why Tatsuya Imai’s name keeps surfacing. The Yankees like his profile, and the timing makes sense. They don’t need another back-end arm. They need someone who can sit near the front of the rotation until Rodon and Cole return, someone who can absorb innings without becoming a liability. If they’re serious about stabilizing the early months, Imai fits the type of move they’ve made before: targeted, aggressive, and born out of necessity.
The Yankees know where this is headed. They’ve watched too many seasons wobble under the weight of thin pitching depth to risk another slow start. The injuries are real, the timelines are lengthy, and the internal options come with uncertainty. A frontline addition isn’t a luxury. It’s the lifeline they’ll need before the season even begins.
And the smart teams don’t wait until March to find one.
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