Easy does it with Yankees' Luis Severino
Yankees starting pitcher Luis Severino stands on the mound as the Reds' Mike Moustakas rounds the bases on his solo home run during the second inning of an MLB game at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
It sounded like a special sort of scary story – the type they tell young pitchers around a metaphorical campfire at a national showcase.
The shoulder was tight when he first woke up, Luis Severino said, and when he came into Yankee Stadium Wednesday and told trainers, there was concern, yes, but everyone eventually seemed to agree that it was likely just part of the aches and pains so common to the profession.
“Usually, when you feel like that, you go to warm up, you get in the hot tub and everything goes away,” he said Thursday, at that point still awaiting the MRI results that eventually landed him on the 15-day injured list.
But it didn’t fully go away, not really. Severino felt he could pitch when he took the hill against the Reds, but the shoulder progressively tightened in the second before he motioned to trainers at the start of the third inning. And though this harrowing tale doesn’t end with the biggest jump scare of all – his shoulder seems generally OK, but the Yankees will still hold their collective breath until he’s actually back on the mound — it should still serve as a cautionary tale.
The Yankees can count themselves lucky that Severino was only diagnosed with a mild lat strain, an injury MLB’s online glossary says generally only entails about two to the three weeks of recovery time. It still doesn’t erase the fact that anyone with eyes could sense something was wrong from the start Wednesday – his velocity was immediately down on all four of his pitches and the Reds feasted, hitting three straight homers in the second. There was also a tentativeness to Severino – one he copped to after the game, and one no one can fault him for, given his prolific injury history.
No one is saying that the Yankees need to roll Severino in bubble wrap, lest a strong gust of wind fell him forever. But going into this season, Severino had pitched just 18 innings since his All-Star campaign in 2018, victim to a rotator cuff injury and another lat strain and, oh yeah, Tommy John surgery. Given all that, the fact that he’s already pitched 86 innings before the All-Star break should at least give the Yankees pause, especially considering that anything short of a long postseason run will, at this point, count as a failure. Severino shouldn’t even have been put in the position to have to take himself out.
Of course, this is a smart franchise, full of very smart people with very complicated graphs, and there seems to be no logical way they would have allowed Severino to pitch 170 innings before the first crisp October day. In that way, a few weeks off will likely help everyone in the long run: Severino will get healthy, his innings will naturally get limited, and it comes at the best-possible time, with the All-Star break ahead, meaning it’s possible he only misses a handful of starts.
But they also, no doubt, need to hammer down their long-term solution. Nestor Cortes, who pitched Thursday, will also come up against an innings limit, and the Yankees have already talked about easing off of him.
There’s Luis Castillo, the guy pitching opposite them Thursday, but given the scarcity of the market, and the number of teams still in it because of the expanded playoffs, he’s going to be expensive - top-prospect expensive. And it’s not immediately clear how much the Yankees are willing to give up, though it’s a safe bet to say they’d balk at parting with a guy like Anthony Volpe or Jasson Dominguez. There’s also Domingo German, who’s throwing in his final rehab appearance Friday – he’s mercurial, but when he’s on, he can eat up innings. JP Sears, who was optioned after long-relief duties Wednesday, has also been more than capable, and Clarke Schmidt has proven he can handle himself on a major-league level.
All of which is to say that the Yankees need to be careful - more careful than they even have been - and have all the tools they need to do so.
“Waking up that day, my shoulder wasn’t feeling normal,” Severino said. “Why push it? Why push it now? I’ll take a couple days off and hopefully be good.”
Why push it, indeed. So maybe next time, when Severino says his shoulder is tight, he can take a seat. The Yankees can afford it.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
