Luis Severino hears the voices of confidence in gem for Mets
New York Mets starting pitcher Luis Severino gets a water bath after pitching a complete game shut against the Miami Marlins in an MLB baseball game at Citi Field on Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024. The Mets defeated the Miami Marlins 4-0. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
There was a time when the voices would haunt Luis Severino on the mound — when that incredible promise, when his once-untouchable stuff was no match for the ghosts of a career gone awry.
Why can’t you stay healthy, they’d whisper. What will it be next? A shoulder? An elbow? An oblique?
Or what if it’s just too late? What if you peaked at 24?
What if, what if, what if . . . like a nasty tell-tale heart that sometimes would make his face contort into a mask of anguish and doubt while he stared down the TV cameras, trying to come up with the reason for why the things that used to work just didn’t anymore.
“I’m not going to lie: Every time I give up a homer or a run in the first inning, [I think] . . . what am I doing?” he said last year after an ERA around 8.00 shipped him to the Yankees’ bullpen right before he was set to hit free agency. “I start looking at different stuff. Is this mechanical? Is this tipping?”
But those weren’t the voices he heard Saturday afternoon, when he pitched his first complete game since 2018 and the second of his career.
No, as he mowed down Marlin after Marlin in the Mets’ 4-0 win, a different sort of refrain overtook the mound at Citi Field.
It started in earnest around the eighth after he got Xavier Edwards to ground out to end the inning. It rose to a crescendo in the ninth, when he jogged onto the field as the crowd chanted “Se-vy” at a volume that must have drowned out his past few seasons.
After Severino hit the first batter, Carlos Mendoza dutifully went out to visit the player he’s known since Severino was 15 — a player whom he saw struggle when Mendoza was a bench coach in the Bronx last year.
This time, though, it was Severino’s voice that mattered. Dámelo, dámelo. “Give it to me.”
And Mendoza did.
“I’m proud of him, because it hasn’t been easy,” he said, adding that after the eighth, he followed Severino to the batting cage by the tunnel to figure out what to do next. “I said, ‘Look at me in the eye. We care so much about you . . . I don’t want you to be a hero here,’ [and he said], ‘I’m good, I’m good.’ ”
There’s a natural tendency to look at all this through the lens of one of those inspirational sports movies — a comeback player who regained his confidence after it looked as if his career might be over. And sure, that’s part of the narrative. But it’s also so much more nuanced than that.
Severino, by his own admission, didn’t just snap out of it. He spent the offseason looking into the biomechanics of his body and working on practical ways to stay healthy. He regularly consults with strength and conditioning coaches, knowing that, at 142 2⁄3 innings, this is his biggest season workload since 2018. He takes care to make sure he’s not tipping his pitches, which he genuinely believes was a factor in 2023.
He has an ally in Mendoza, who embraced him the minute he recorded the final out on his 113th pitch of the evening — Derek Hill’s swinging strike three on a sweeper out of the zone.
He hit 98.6 mph in the ninth, fueled by adrenaline and crowd noise and the type of confidence that comes from confronting doubts rather than ignoring them.
Severino is 8-6 with a 3.91 ERA. At times, his spurts of dominance — and Kodai Senga’s injury — make him feel like the staff ace. And he’s done all this on a one-year, $13 million “show me’’ contract — the definition of a make-or-break year for his future.
“Last year was hard,” Mendoza said. “They’re human, you know? I don’t think he struggled like that in his career.”
So when this year’s struggles came, Severino’s mind seemed ready. Going into Saturday, he had had three rough starts in a row — 0-3 with a 9.69 ERA in 13 innings. Predictably, the voices were starting up again. Was he hitting a wall? Would he stay durable when the Mets need him the most? But this time, he didn’t seem to hear them.
A lot of that has to do with what he’s been through and the surgical way he’s attacked the pitfalls that almost brought down his career, and some of that has to do with his manager.
“The work that I did in the offseason put me here, but [Mendoza] has given me a lot of confidence,” Severino said. “I have confidence in myself. When he goes out there, the pep talk he gives me is different than everybody else.”
It turns out these were the voices Severino finally needed to hear to get back to where he once was — the fans chanting his name, the encouragement of a manager he trusts and, mainly, his own voice, saying with unwavering confidence, “Dámelo.”
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.