A's Bringing Extra Bat to New York Amid Brent Rooker Injury Concern
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In the first inning of Thursday's 1-0 win over the New York Yankees, A's DH Brent Rooker appeared to injure himself on a swing, and was immediately removed from the game. The A's are calling it right flank discomfort, and it caused Rooker to feel some tightness and discomfort on his right side. He is set to undergo imaging on Friday morning.
Rooker left the game after this swing. pic.twitter.com/z8D6qJjg5i
— Jason Burke (@ByJasonB) April 9, 2026
There has been no determination how long Rooker will miss—if any time at all—but the club wanted to be prepared with another bat on hand, so they are flying Zack Gelof to New York as a security measure. Manolo Hernandez was the first to report this information from Sacramento.
His status on the Las Vegas Aviators' website also says that he is part of the "taxi squad" under status, which is what it said for Jack Perkins before he was officially called up yesterday.
Gelof is raking out of the gate
In the game we witnessed in Sacramento on Wednesday, Gelof went 0-for-4 with two walks and a costly error in the bottom of the 11th. That said, he was also driving the ball to the opposing field, including a high fastball that he lined to right at 104.7 miles per hour off the bat with a 23 degree launch angle. That one traveled to the wall.
Overall this season he has been terrific, and there are a couple of factors, aside from driving the ball to the opposite field, that could signal that he's turned a corner and could be approaching the player he was in his rookie season. Back in 2023, he hit .267 with a .337 OBP and cracked 14 home runs while swiping 14 stolen bases in just 69 games.
In a small sample size this season, he's batting .366 (15-for-41) with a .519 OBP, four home runs, 10 RBI and three stolen bases in 11 games. That's a stat line that A's fans would love to see from Gelof again in the big leagues.
Why this early start might be the real deal
The two stats that jump out immediately for Gelof this season are his 24.1% walk rate, and his 13% strikeout rate. His 13 walks are the second-most in the Pacific Coast League behind 23-year-old Christian Moore of the Los Angeles Angels.
The big one in our opinion is that strikeout rate. Back in 2024, he ranked in the second percentile in whiff rate at 36.4%, and in the first percentile in strikeout rate at 34.4%. Among qualified hitters, that was the worst strikeout rate in baseball that season.
Last year, while battling a slew of injuries, Gelof struck out 45.5% of the time in the big leagues in 101 plate appearances, and it was still up at 25.4% in Triple-A. While the expectation isn't that he'll maintain that 13% strikeout rate if/when he gets called up to the A's roster, the hope here is that it'll be somewhere between that number and the 34.4% he put up in 2024.
As for his potential role, that is up in the air. While he has moved around the diamond a bit, collecting two games in left field, with one in right and another two in center, he has still played most of his games (5) at second base.
His addition to the roster would provide some versatility if manager Mark Kotsay wanted to get one of his guys a half day and have them DH, like Lawrence Butler, while Gelof could get a look at a number of positions in the field.
We should know more about Rooker's status for this weekend on Friday afternoon.
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Jason has been covering the A’s at various sites for over a decade, and was the original host of the Locked on A’s podcast. He also covers the Stanford Cardinal as they attempt to rebuild numerous programs to prominence.
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