NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Gerrit Cole crouched behind the mound, stared at the dirt and after a 569-day absence climbed on the rubber in a major league game that mattered.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust let it rip downrange and see what we got,\u201d the New York Yankees ace thought to himself.<\/p>\n
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Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Gerrit Cole crouched behind the mound, stared at the dirt and after a 569-day…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2377],"tags":[5,88756,4,256,297,185,2550,68,2551,2549],"class_list":["post-706338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa-bay-rays","tag-baseball","tag-gerrit-cole-yankees-elbow-surgery-return","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-baseball","tag-rays","tag-sports","tag-tampa-bay","tag-tampa-bay-rays","tag-tampabay","tag-tampabayrays"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116622180228657536","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}