BRONX — The Yankees continue to slowly work their back to being healthy, and the return of Aaron Judge was one step towards that. Josh Donaldson’s return would be another.
The third baseman has been sidelined with a hamstring strain and has been ramping up baseball activities this week. He was doing field work at Yankee Stadium ahead of Tuesday’s game against the Oakland Athletics.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone said that Donaldson will do a week of “intense baseball activity” before getting a new rehab assignment. That won’t come until the end of the week or next week.
“He’s been doing well here really these last week or 10 days,” Boone said. “Now we’ll kind of up that workload all week as far as full baseball activities. If that continues to go well then we’ll talk about a rehab assignment.”
Carlos Rodon gets cortisone shot
The Yankees’ big offseason addition has yet to pitch this season and on Tuesday he received a cortisone shot to help with the back issue that has kept him from playing. Rodon won’t be able to do much of anything during the 48-hour period after the shot and then the team will be better able to assess the situation.
The team is hoping that Rodon will be able to exercise by Friday and start throwing over the weekend. Rodon has been dealing with what has been described as a chronic back issue which developed after he started his ramp-up from a forearm strain that occurred during spring training.
Rodon will still need to ramp back up and go through a rehab assignment before he gets on the mound for the Yankees. The righty had signed a six-year, $162 million deal during the offseason to be the team’s second ace behind Gerrit Cole.
He made one start in spring training before the issues started to pop up.
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