Yankees ace Gerrit Cole scheduled for season debut Wednesday vs. Orioles

New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole is slated to make his season debut Wednesday after starting the season on the injured list due to an elbow injury.

It’s a big matchup. Cole, 33, will take the mound for the Yankees against the Baltimore Orioles with the two teams locked in a battle atop the AL East. Yankees manager Aaron Boone announced Cole’s status on Monday.

A six-time All-Star and a two-time ERA champion, Cole won his first career Cy Young award last season after posting an AL-best 2.63 ERA and 0.981 WHIP with 222 strikeouts and 48 walks in 209 innings pitched.

He started this season on the injured list after experiencing nerve inflammation and swelling in his pitching elbow. He avoided Tommy John surgery and has been gearing up in rehab starts in recent weeks.

The injury is a rare case for Cole, who has made at least 17 starts in each of his 11 MLB seasons, excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign. He has thrown 181-plus innings in each of the six previous non-pandemic seasons and 200-plus innings in five of those seasons.

Cole returns to a Yankees team that has thrived in his absence. New York entered Monday with the best record in baseball at 50-24. The 47-24 Orioles are tied for the second-best record in the sport, and they sit just 1.5 games behind the Yankees in the AL East.

Cole’s return gives the Yankees a leg up in the hotly contested race that could come down to the end of the season. He has looked strong in his rehab starts, with 19 strikeouts and zero walks issued in 12 1/3 innings. He has also thrown from the mound at Yankee Stadium during pregame warm-ups.

If Cole can stay healthy, baseball’s most competitive division just got considerably tougher at the top.