Yankees’ Gerrit Cole is Josh Donaldson’s new massage therapist? Aaron Boone not surprised - NJ.com

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TORONTO — Yankees third baseman Josh Donaldson doesn’t just play with an edge that can look and sound like he’s picking fights with the likes of Tim Anderson. He has a temper, and it came out in the first inning of Sunday’s 10-9 loss to the Blue Jays when he was drilled in the arm by lefty Yusei Kikuchi.

Donaldson yelled in pain, then spiked his bat to the ground as hard as he could in disgust as he started taking his free base. Blue Jays fans responded by loudly booing a player who was the AL MVP playing for their team in 2015.

Donaldson needed calming down.

Someone should have summoned Gerrit Cole from the Yankees dugout.

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Did you see the video clip from Friday night’s game that was making its rounds on social media, the one where Cole was giving Donaldson a shoulder rub in the Yankees’ dugout? Fans were tweeting, “There’s another thing I never thought I’d see from the Yankees this year.”

Uh huh.

These Yankees sure aren’t a second coming of the Bronx Zoo Yankees. They win almost every day and get along.

Even Donaldson and Cole.

It was just three months ago last week that Donaldson joined the Yankees in a March trade and then had a closed-door meeting with Cole and his new manager as soon as he reported to Tampa. When Donaldson was with the Twins last season, he accused Cole of doctoring baseballs to increase his spin rate. Cole was angry then and still angry when Donaldson became his teammate.

That meeting in the manager’s office with manager Aaron Boone playing mediator apparently did lead to a truce. Boone said it then, but few outsiders probably believed it was true. Now that Cole is acting like Donaldson’s massage therapist, yes, it appears they’ve become pals.

“Like any team, any family, you always have issues that come up, and these guys have done a really good job of dealing with those,” Boone said before Sunday’s game. “I think through it all, whether it’s great times you go through that bring closeness or whether it’s challenging times, if you can get through those, usually it makes you a little bit closer. And there’s no question this group is really, really tight.”

Boone said he knew that Cole and Donaldson would get along by the time their spring meeting was over.

“I walked out thinking, ‘We’re good,’” Boone said. “It was a very honest meeting. We sat in there and had it out, but no question we came out of there, in my mind, united.”

As for Donaldson flipping out for a moment on Sunday, he got a little revenge on the Jays. Next time up, he homered off Kikuchi, then flipped his bat and stood in the batter’s box watching the blast carry over the center-field wall to turn a 2-1 Yankees deficit into a 3-2 lead.

By game’s end, Donaldson perhaps was in a bad mood again though because the Yankees wound up losing after building an 8-3 lead. He wasn’t in the Yankees clubhouse during post-game media availability. Come to think of it, neither was Cole.

Hmmm.

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Randy Miller may be reached at [email protected].