Joe Girardi isn’t tempering expectations.
The Yankees manager is looking forward to seeing Luis Severino make his major league debut for the Yankees and he wasn’t afraid to express his excitement mere hours before the highly anticipated right-hander toed the Yankees Stadium rubber.
“There are two kinds of excitement,” Girardi said on Wednesday at Modell’s in Times Square, for the release of his new video game app, “Portalball.”
“The first excitement is to see his stuff. We really haven’t seen him since spring training, and he has improved a lot and moved through our system very quickly. The other excitement is to see how he handles it. It’s always exciting to see how young players handle the situation and how they grow from it.”
Besides Severino’s electric stuff, what impressed Girardi most during spring training was how well the 21-year-old flame-thrower handled being in big-league camp. In most cases, Girardi said, young players struggle that first time sharing a field with established major leaguers, but not Severino, who was 9-2 with a 2.45 ERA in 19 starts with Double-A Trenton and Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
“He never went through that,” Girardi said. “He was confident from day one, threw strikes, challenges hitters. I think he’ll handle it fine [in the Major Leagues] from day one.”
The first-place Yankees’ starting rotation could certainly use another big arm, with Michael Pineda (right forearm strain) out until September, CC Sabathia struggling and Masahiro Tanaka pitching to an underwhelming 3.84 ERA.
“I think it’s huge,” Girardi said of adding Severino to the rotation. “Obviously, you’re always trying to improve your team and if he can come up and pitch at a high level, that would be big.”