ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – For the first time this season, Carlos Rodon and the Yankees were finally in the same vicinity on Friday.

But the closest Rodon came to any kind of baseball activity was doing some agility drills on Friday morning at the Yankees’ player development complex, under the watchful eye of Eric Cressey, the team’s director of player health and performance.

After leaving spring training five and a half weeks ago, hoping that Rodon would return from his forearm muscle strain at some point in April, the Yankees returned to Florida with their $162 million left-hander now stalled by a stiff back.

Rodon will receive an injection akin to a cortisone shot early next week, manager Aaron Boone said Friday at Tropicana Field, which the Yankees hope will help solve the back issues that have been restricting Rodon in his recent bullpen sessions. 

Rodon has not thrown the last two days and will not throw for an unspecified amount of time after receiving the injection, but the hope is that he can start building back up after that – potentially for a late June return, though he and the Yankees have declined to put a timetable on it.

“It’s hard,” Rodon said, speaking with reporters for the first time since spring training. “I wanted to throw today, I wanted to throw yesterday. But that’s why we have the training staff we do have so I don’t do something stupid and make something worse.”

“But yeah, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do that, if I wasn’t pushing [to throw].”

Rodon only made one start in spring training, with the Yankees shutting him down a few days later after an MRI exam revealed what the team described as a “mild forearm muscle strain.”

General manager Brian Cashman said at the time that “in a perfect world,” Rodon would return “some time in April.”

Instead, while Rodon was in the midst of ramping back up by throwing bullpen sessions and starting to face hitters in simulated games, he was thrown off course by back stiffness during the second week of April.