Yankees Tease A "timeout" Coming For Luis Gil!

Thank the baseball gods so far this season for Luis Gil! He has been on a tear this season, but there is still a long way to go. He’s in his first year back after Tommy John surgery and the Yankees will err on the side of caution and look for ways to limit his workload as we approach the midpoint of the season.

Sounds a lot like an innings limit, but the Yankees won’t call it an innings limit. In fact, back in March the Yankees said Gil would have no innings restrictions, read more HERE but now the Yankees are back peddling to this. Is anyone surprised?

We shouldn’t be. All of us want nothing more than to watch Gil pitch effectively for the rest of the season and stay healthy. The Yankees have their own ideas (historically bad ones), and you can feel free to throw in the Joba Chamberlain reference starting now. The Yankees ruined Joba. We all hope they learned their lesson with that but I’m skeptical.

A lot has changed since the Joba days, even Matt Blake admits it. Back in March, The Post wrote “Blake noted all the tools that now exist to measure strength and flexibility between starts and if a pitcher is, for example, lowering his arm angle during a game, as a way to assess red flags.” So baseball today is more advanced, you can do more than just limit innings. You can actually see more meaningful data that helps a team understand how a pitcher is handling their current workload.

But even with that insight, Blake says Gil still might get a “timeout” or spend some time in the bullpen. So basically, the routine Gil has now likely won’t be what he has in the near future. Needless to say, I am not a fan of the Yankees tactic, based on what Blake described. It just sounds like another mistake waiting to happen.

We all know pitchers THRIVE on routine. Starters structure their daily activities so they are ready to take the ball every fifth day. They have other routines they follow between starts. Not for nothin, after watching Gil’s last start against the Dodgers on Sunday I don’t want to change a single thing he is doing right now. As the saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He’s on a tear, let him stay on his current course!

I’m not a fan of Blake’s “timeout” idea or the idea of moving him to the bullpen. A relief pitcher has a completely different routine and if the Yankees bounce Gil around like they did Joba they will burn him out and he will get hurt again. 

Gil has pitched 75 innings already this season. Bouncing him to the bullpen is not the answer to limit his workload. The Yankees need to be smarter than this and learn from their mistakes. The only person who needs a “timeout” is Blake for his stupid suggestion.

–Jeana Bellezza-Ochoa