Yankees' Luis Severino on COVID IL so Aaron Boone opens with reliever
Luis Severino #40 of the Yankees reacts on the noynd during the first inning against the Chicago Cubs at Yankee Stadium on Friday, June 10, 2022. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Aaron Boone went to bed on Wednesday night figuring that Luis Severino would be unable to make his scheduled start on Thursday and that Clarke Schmidt would likely take his place in the rotation.
Schmidt, though, had no clue about this plan.
It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that Boone made the call to the reliever to tell him he would take the mound for the third and final game of the series against the Rays at Yankee Stadium, his third career start and first since last September. Severino was placed on COVID IL.
“I didn’t want to mess with anything,” Boone said of delaying the notification to Schmidt as long as he did.
It’s natural for the manager of a team which entered Thursday’s contest 30 games over .500 and with a nine game lead in the division to try to avoid “messing” with anything. Severino’s illness – as of game time he had not actually tested positive and Boone said he was feeling “a lot better” after experiencing fever and chills on Wednesday evening – represented the first real hiccup of the season for a cruise control rotation that has so far been the engine thrusting the Yankees to their success. As such, it did require Boone’s attention.
Barely.
“You have to piece it together a little bit tonight which will be a little more challenging,” he said of putting the game entirely on the arms in the bullpen. “But [we] also feel great about where we’re at as a team and as a pitching staff that we’re equipped to go out and not only handle it but still handle it with a lot of expectations.”
Schmidt met them, delivering three scoreless innings allowing one hit and striking out five. Boone said before the game he hoped Schmidt could give the Yankees 40 to 50 pitches and that’s exactly what they got, 50 on the dot. Schmidt was replaced by righthander Ryan Weber to start the fourth in a still scoreless game. Weber was called up from Triple-A to take Severino’s place on the 26-man roster on Thursday
In typical fashion for the 2022 Yankees who have been humming along for the first two months of the season, Severino’s unexpected scratch may actually come with a potential silver lining. It allows the Yankees to pull back on the innings and timing of starts for both Severino and Nester Cortes, the lefty who Boone said “hit a bit of a wall” in the sixth inning of Wednesday’s victory over the Rays.
If medically cleared, Severino could theoretically return to the mound on Monday, which projects to be Cortes’ next scheduled start. It could give Cortes, who has been the team’s best pitcher, an extra day of rest as he ventures deeper into a season that will almost certainly see him throw more innings than he has in his career (he’s currently at 69 2/3, just a few starts shy of the 93 he threw last year). Severino gets a bit of an unscheduled break in a season that has seen him throw 61 innings in his first full-time work since a shoulder injury and then Tommy John surgery sidelined him beginning in early 2019.
“You have to be a little more creative and we’re in a stretch where we don’t have a day off for a while,” Boone said of the immediate consequences of Severino being sidelined.
But that his respite comes not via another concerning arm injury but something that should pose no long-term threat to his comeback season left the Yankees shorthanded for the night but could, in fact, make them stronger in the long run.
At the very least, it shouldn’t “mess” with much.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
