Yankees News: Chris Capuano Out a Few Weeks After Suffering Leg Injury

The New York Yankees entered Spring Training with plenty of health concerns surrounding their starting pitching rotation.

Those concerns only got bigger Wednesday afternoon when Chris Capuano left his scheduled start against the Red Sox in the middle of the first-inning after getting hurt while covering first base on a Brock Holt slow roller. He was later examined by the Yankees medical staff and diagnosed with a strained right quad, and underwent an MRI.

A few moments ago, Marly Rivera of ESPN Deportes revealed the results of Capuano’s MRI:

Capuano was re-signed to serve primarily as a back-end starter, but with Masahiro Tanaka (elbow), Michael Pineda (shoulder) and C.C. Sabathia (knee) still trying to prove they’re healthy enough to join the starting rotation for the start of the season, the last thing the Yankees need is another major injury in their starting rotation.

In fact, this was something general manager Brian Cashman addressed before today’s game.

“It’s the next step in the progression,” Cashman told Dan Martin of The New York Post. “I’ve been at this job a long time and I used to sweat things that I couldn’t control.”

One of those things being the health of his starting pitchers.

“Weather is not in my control just like it’s not in my control whether Tanaka stays healthy 10 more years or 10 more days,” Cashman said. “It’s not something quite honestly I’m going to worry about.”

Tanaka’s recovery has looked promising thus far, but one more setback and it’s likely he’ll be headed for Tommy John surgery.

“If it declares itself in an adverse way, we’ll just have to deal with it and deal with what next course of action is — which would be surgery if he has a problem, you’d think,” Cashman said. “But he’s been great. Everything’s been as good as we can expect for all those guys thus far. [Thursday] will be another step in the process.”

Cashman did admit that a majority of the Yankees chances at success in 2015 do fall on the shoulders of Tanaka, Pineda and Sabathia bouncing-back and living up to their expectations.

“We’re certainly hoping for big things from those guys,” Cashman said. “We need big things from those guys, but we need big things from a lot of guys.”

Obviously Chris Capuano wasn’t a guy the Yankees were expecting much from in 2015, but they’d still like to have him eat some innings and provide a serviceable arm every fifth day in the rotation.

Now we’ll have to wait and see how Capuano recover’s over the next few weeks.

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