Yankees' Luis Gil turned to teammate for instant injury advice

Moments after Luis Gil cut his bullpen session short last Friday, feeling tightness near his shoulder, the Yankees right-hander pulled fellow starter Clarke Schmidt aside.

Gil knew Schmidt went through similar discomfort last season when he suffered a right lat strain.

An MRI wouldn’t confirm that Gil had the same exact injury for another few days, but in that moment, the reigning American League Rookie of the Year was already hungry to pick Schmidt’s brain about what worked in his rehab and how he got better.

“I’m hoping to use that,” Gil told reporters at Yankees camp on Monday.

Gil has a high-grade lat strain and won’t throw for the next six weeks, if not longer, Yankees manager Aaron Boone revealed on Monday. Factor in another six weeks or so for Gil to ramp back up and he could be sidelined for about three months. That’s if he doesn’t have any setbacks during his rehab journey.

Schmidt’s shutdown from throwing lasted only four weeks last May and it still took him over three months to get back to the rotation in early September.

In that sense, considering Gil has a high-grade strain, it might take him even longer.

What is it that makes this injury require such a long layoff? Schmidt explained that the lat is arguably the biggest muscle a pitcher uses when he’s throwing. There’s no way to compensate for it.

“You can’t hide from it,” Schmidt said. “If you have other injuries or things going on, sometimes you can make compromises and figure out ways to keep throwing with it. But with this, you feel it every time you’re throwing. So that’s definitely why. Everything you do, you feel it.”

Gil was magnificent in his first full season with the Yankees last year. There were stretches in the first half when he was a top starter in all of baseball, a threat to strike out 10-plus hitters every time he took the ball. Gil was even pitching his way into way-too-early Cy Young Award conversations. He finished the year with a 3.50 ERA over a career-high 151 2/3 innings.

No injury comes at a good time, but that makes this sting even more for Gil.

Schmidt can attest to that considering he was off to a strong start last year when he got hurt. Before the injury, Schmidt had a 2.52 ERA over 11 starts.

“Definitely feel for him,” Schmidt said. “Obviously tough after having such a good year last year. A heavy workload. You gotta be super detailed on your programs and your build-ups, just very unfortunate for him.”

With Gil out of the picture for the foreseeable future, the focus turns to the rest of the rotation. The pressure is on for Gerrit Cole, Max Fried, Carlos Rodón, Schmidt and Marcus Stroman.

“I think we just feed off each other,” Schmidt said. “I think that’s the biggest thing is when you’re in the rotation and one guy goes out there and does his job, it makes it a lot easier for the guy behind him to do it. It’s a domino effect. If you’re going into a series, and you have a guy who starts it off really well keeping hitters off balance, makes them second guess themselves with pitch selection, it carries over to the next game and next game. You take that series to series, you can get on a roll and that goes month to month.”

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Max Goodman may be reached at mgoodman@njadvancemedia.com.