DENVER — Luis Severino took the Yankee Stadium mound Tuesday night, his first start of the season after battling multiple injuries, with the hopes of helping his team in October… which is only weeks away.
Not many pitchers can relate to the unique challenges of that quick ramp-up from inactivity. One of them, though, just joined Severino’s cross-town rivals and offered rather simple counsel: Ride the wave.
“It’s just something that honestly, you kind of just go off the momentum of the team,” Marcus Stroman told The Post Wednesday, before the Mets concluded their series with the Rockies at Coors Field. “When you’re in a playoff race, obviously all the emotions, the excitement, everything is heightened. So you kind of don’t need to get yourself up. Your adrenaline takes care of everything. You don’t really feel injuries honestly at that point.
“So Severino is Severino. I think he’s gonna be OK.”
In spring training of 2015, which was set to be his first full big-league year, the Medford native Stroman tore his left ACL. It appeared to be a season-ending injury. Yet Stroman rehabilitated his way back to start for the Blue Jays on Sept. 12, Toronto’s 142nd game of the season. He wound up starting four games in September and winning all of them, then made three postseason starts, tallying a 4.19 ERA.
“We had a need for starting pitching,” Stroman said. “I jumped in. So the timing and everything matched up perfectly, me coming back from the ACL, from Duke (where he recovered and completed his undergraduate degree).”
Since 1995, according to research conducted by the MLB Network’s Eric Nehs, only two pitchers have made their first appearance of the season later than Stroman and proceeded to start a postseason game. The Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter made his 2012 debut in Game 151, and the Rays’ Matt Moore, a rookie, arrived in the majors in Game 148 of 2011. If Severino, who started the Yankees’ 152nd game on Tuesday, starts a playoff game, he’d rank second on this all-time list, behind the Tigers’ Virgil Trucks in 1945 (Game 155).
Not surprisingly, given his ultra-quick recovery from such a serious injury, “I wasn’t at 100 percent at all (upon returning),” Stroman said. “I’m sure (Severino) is at 100 percent. I don’t think the Yankees would allow him to be out there if he wasn’t. But I was pitching at probably about 82 to 85 percent on my left knee, which is my landing leg. I think my case is a little different.”
A little different, for sure. Similar, though, in the timeline and the hopes.
“I think he’s healthy. I think he’s back. You saw his stuff (Tuesday),” Stroman said of Severino. “So now I think it’s ‘compete, compete, compete at this level.”
— with Joel Sherman