NEW YORK (AP) — Carlos Rodón remembered back to last year.
“I couldn’t really bend my arm. I couldn’t button a shirt,” the New York Yankees left-hander said. ”I couldn't scratch my face. I couldn't take a drink of water. ... I could definitely never comb my hair."
Seven months after elbow surgery, the 33-year-old is set to return to a major league mound Sunday at the Milwaukee Brewers. While he feels a lot better, it's not like when he reached the major leagues with the Chicago White Sox a decade ago.
“That’s almost a virgin arm then,” he quipped.
Rodón is 93-72 with a 3.73 ERA in 11 major league seasons, including 37-26 since signing a $162 million, six-year contract with the Yankees in December 2023.
He was 18-9 with a 3.09 ERA last season despite an ailing arm. His four-seam fastball velocity, which averaged 95.3 mph in his first season with the Yankees, was 94.4 mph in the first half last year and dropped to 93.8 mph in the second half.
“He was great last year. So, just had to do it a different way. He didn’t have the range of motion,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “But I think if you talk to major league pitchers, especially ones that have done it for a while, you’re kind of always dealing with different stuff. So credit to him for being able to navigate it last year and with excellence.”
Rodón's fastball velocity dropped to 93.4 mph in his Division Series start against Toronto, when he allowed six runs and lasted just 2 1/3 innings.
“They were mending to him every day to get him to post,” pitching coach Matt Blake said.
Rodón said his elbow deterioration occurred over three-to-four years. He was willing to tolerate the pain to get through last season.
“Did it hurt? Sometimes sure, pitching, but I’d rather go out there and compete," he said. “I was throwing well, so I couldn't just say, 'Oh, I can't pitch,' but it was manageable.”
Rodón had surgery Oct. 15 to remove loose bodies in his left elbow and shave a bone spur, then had a setback in late March when he felt tightness in his right hamstring while throwing at the Yankees’ Florida complex.
As part of his rehabilitation, he had a pair of platelet-rich plasma injections.
“The first one was early. I really remember it because it was vivid because my arm felt like it got ran over by a bus,” he said.
He reported to spring training in the mid-to-upper 250-pound range, about 10 pounds above his target, but figured the weight would come off as he readied for his return.
“I guess a happy offseason," he said with a laugh. "I enjoy food.”
Rodón made three starts during a minor league injury rehabilitation assignment that started April 24 and had a 3.38 ERA and 16 strikeouts while allowing three walks and three homers in 16 innings.
He threw 83 pitches in his last outing and will have a limit of about the same against the Brewers.
“Not as daunting as Tommy John’s surgery,” said Rodón, who had his UCL repaired in 2019. “You never want to go under the knife, for sure, but it’s good to be at the end of the road.”
Blake notices the difference in Rodón's mechanics.
“You can see there’s just a little more freedom of motion in the arm action,” he said. “It looks a little easier. It’s not as much body creating the power.”
But with that added motion, Rodón has to work to regain command.
“I’m happy with the recovery,” he said. “So just keep going.”
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FILE - New York Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodón delivers against the Boston Red Sox during the first inning of Game 2 of an American League wild-card baseball playoff series, Oct. 1, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform.
By late Thursday, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said the platform was available again to most users.
The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. On Friday, Instructure and Canvas no longer appeared on a site where ShinyHunters lists its targets.
Some schools, however, have continued to block students and teachers from accessing Canvas, citing an abundance of caution while assessing security threats.
Here's what to know about the outage.
Schools and universities use Canvas to manage nearly all aspects of instruction. The platform acts as a gradebook, a hub for digital lectures and course materials, a discussion board for classroom projects, and a messaging platform between students and instructors.
Some courses also give quizzes and exams on the platform, or use it as a portal where final projects and papers are submitted on deadline.
ShinyHunters is a loose association of teenage and young adult hackers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom who have been linked to other large-scale cyberattacks, including one on Ticketmaster, Connolly said. On the page listing their targets, the group describes itself as “rooting your systems since ‘19,” using a term for accessing a computer system’s deepest layer.
Earlier this week, ShinyHunters said that nearly 9,000 schools and 275 million individuals' data could be leaked if schools did not pay the ransom by a deadline of May 6. The group then extended the deadline, indicating some schools had engaged with them to negotiate.
In a statement posted to ShinyHunters' ransomware site, the group said it would not be commenting on the incident.
Schools and universities, rich in personally-identifiable information on students, teachers and employees, have become prime targets for criminal hackers in ransomware attacks. Targets can be individual districts, like the Minneapolis Public Schools or Los Angeles Unified School District, or external vendor platforms like Canvas or PowerSchool that education systems increasingly rely on to manage schedules, courses and exams.
The data breach appeared to involve student ID numbers, email addresses, names and messages on the Canvas platform, Instructure’s chief information security officer, Steve Proud, said in an update shared Saturday. He said the company had not found evidence that passwords, dates of birth, government identification or financial information were compromised.
Though most schools seem to have restored access to Canvas, the disruptions to finals period are likely to ripple throughout the week.
The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth said that it would postpone exams scheduled for Friday and Saturday to ensure students had time to review course materials that would not have been accessible during the shutdown.
The University of Illinois postponed all exams that were scheduled to take place Friday, Saturday or Sunday for all classes, regardless of whether the courses utilized Canvas.
And Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland continued to limit access to Canvas on Friday, citing an abundance of caution “while we work to better understand the full impact of the incident and any potential vulnerabilities involving information connected to the platform.”
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE - People take photos near a John Harvard statue, left, on the Harvard University campus, Jan. 2, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)
