New York Yankees starting pitcher and reigning American League Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole, who is currently sidelined with an elbow injury until late May, spoke out against Major League Baseball’s statement that the pitch clock is not a contributing factor to the rise of pitcher injuries across the sport.

“When I read the response from MLB — I didn’t think it was very thorough,” Cole told reporters in front of his locker Monday afternoon. “To be able to say you implement something in one year and it has no effect is shortsighted.

We are really going to understand the effects of what the pitch clock is maybe five years down the road, but to dismiss it out of hand, I didn’t think it was helpful for the situation.”

Cole said he was “disheartened” by MLB’s response and the Players Association’s initial statement it was responding to, both of which only focused on the pitch clock. He said there are multiple contributing factors to the rise of arm injuries, like the importance of maximum velocity and spin.

Because of how advanced hitters have become, the strike zone becoming smaller in players’ eyes, the crackdown of sticky substances, and the differentiation from ball to ball and bats improving, pitchers are often finding themselves pushed towards maximum effort on every single pitch.

But the most blowback from the players’ perspective has been the reduced pitch clock this year. MLB first instituted a pitch clock for the 2023 season set at 15 seconds with nobody on base and 20 seconds with a runner on.

In December, MLB’s competition committee reduced the clock to 18 seconds with runners on base. All four players on the competition committee opposed the change.

“Two seconds,” Cole said, “I don’t know what advertising money you’re getting for two seconds that makes it logical to move it up for two seconds. I know the games got longer as the season went on, but you’re not going to change the curve of that direction.

You’re always going to start off with shorter games at the beginning of the year and finish with longer games. The games become more important at the end. I asked someone high up who doesn’t work there anymore what exactly the reason was for it, and he couldn’t really give me a good answer.”

Cole made it clear that he did not believe his elbow inflammation sustained last month was directly correlated with the new pitch clock rules. Cole said he and the Yankees’ medical staff has narrowed down the cause of his injury to “personal variables” that he would not disclose.

Cole’s teammate Jonathan Loáisiga suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament last week that will force him to miss the rest of the season. Loáisiga joined Cleveland Guardians pitcher Shane Bieber, Miami Marlins pitcher Eury Pérez, Atlanta Braves pitcher Spencer Strider and Oakland A’s pitcher Trevor Gott as recent pitchers who’ve suffered UCL injuries.

That doesn’t include the notable pitchers across the league who are currently recovering from elbow surgeries, like Shohei Ohtani, Jacob deGrom, Sandy Alcantara and Shane McClanahan.

When he thinks about the implications for the future of the sport and sees another high-leverage starter shelved for at least a year, Cole said he hopes the league is making sure player health is of the utmost importance. That’s why he saw MLB’s response to the Players Association as “combative.”

“Well, we can start by having more helpful conversations and not pointing fingers and not saying that it’s absolutely this or it’s absolutely not that and we can make it feel that players aren’t necessarily caught in the middle of all of it,” Cole said. “But those aren’t going to have a direct correlation to better performance. I don’t have the answers. I’m just frustrated by the fact that I don’t feel like taking care of the players is the main focus of it.”

Cole was a part of the union as a player representative for the first 10 years of his career but is no longer directly involved. He wouldn’t say if he would call union representatives or the league office to give his opinion on what should be done moving forward. But he did say that he’s had conversations with players who have been negatively affected by MLB’s recent rule changes.

Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow, then a member of the Tampa Bay Rays, told reporters three years ago that he was convinced his inability to grip the baseball without use of a combination of sunscreen and rosin led to his UCL injury. Cole said that rule change is just another example of an adaptation players have had to make without both sides fully realizing the positive and negative effects.

In his experience last year with the pitch clock, Cole said his stamina was affected on multiple occasions.

“I had a couple of specific situations where I ran out of gas early in the year and was caught off guard by it, which obviously is directly correlated to having to adapt to the rules,” Cole said. “But in terms of soreness or anything like that, I feel like I prepared for it as best as I could and obviously performed well and didn’t have any anything extracurricular in that regard. I was able to handle it.”

With the league believing the pitch clock is not leading to an increase in injuries and the Players Association believing the opposite, Cole said the number one thing everyone should be able to agree on is making sure players are on the field as much as possible. Not every pitcher injury is going to fall in one bucket as the sole reason why someone got hurt.

“Pitchers are so different,” Cole said. “Some guys train better with high volume and low intensity. Some guys train better with low volume and high intensity. It’s just different organisms. So it’s not a blanket thing for the league. One of these rule changes could have variables and could affecte a certain group of guys more than another group of guys and vice versa.

“I’m just frustrated it’s a combative issue. It’s like, ‘OK, we have divorced parents, and the child is misbehaving, and we can’t get on the same page to get the child to behave.’ Not that the players are misbehaving, but we have an issue here and we need to get on the same page to at least try to fix it. And it’s like we’re (pointing fingers). Rob (Manfred) cares about the players. He’s supposed to care about players. He’s supposed to really deeply care about them. That is his job.”