Handling of Luis Severino's pain raises questions about Yankees' medical decisions
Yankees pitcher Luis Severino throws during spring training in Tampa, Fla., on Feb. 14. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
TAMPA, Fla.— On paper, the Yankees should be fine despite Tuesday’s jarring revelation that Luis Severino is headed for Tommy John surgery. They won 103 games last year with him pitching a total of 12 innings during the regular season. During the winter, they added Gerrit Cole.
Those are a few of the many reasons why we expect the fully operational Death Star will keep flying straight to October.
Let’s admit this, though. That argument is not quite as airtight as it was only a month ago, before the Yankees surprised everyone with James Paxton’s back surgery and then sprung Severino’s TJ surgery on us after pointing to what we were led to believe was a relatively harmless spot on his right forearm.
And that’s the real issue here. The Yankees keep doing an extremely poor job of convincing us they can keep all their star players on the field. The AL East champs didn’t do it last season, when they sent an MLB-record 30 players to the injured list, and the same problem is carrying over into 2020, despite an overhaul of the medical staff designed to prevent this exact thing.
Injuries happen. And as I’ve said a million times in this space, diagnosing them can be an inexact science. Full disclosure: I'm not an M.D. But the Yankees admittedly whiffed in their treatment of a number of players last season, and going on what general manager Brian Cashman has explained about the Paxton/Severino timelines, it’s hard not to wonder why they were so slow in getting to the surgery part.
Paxton said he was first bothered by back pain at the end of last September, then throughout the playoffs, and it grew worse during the offseason before the Yankees finally identified what had to be done in early February. So instead of using the winter for most of the rehab, and returning closer to Opening Day, the process is costing him up to two months of the regular season.
Severino’s case file is even more exasperating. He complained of this dot-sized discomfort after Game 3 of last October’s ALCS and the Yankees were prepping him to pitch Game 7, which the Astros’ Jose “Bad Tattoo” Altuve made unnecessary. Severino’s pain persisted into the offseason during his throwing workouts in the Dominican Republic — but only on changeups, apparently —and multiple MRIs, taken on two trips back to New York, were negative.
That sounds like due diligence. Until you hear the part about the Yankees actually finding the partially torn UCL by doing a more extensive test, a dye-cast MRI, that wasn’t called for until Monday. Nearly four months after Severino’s initial complaint, which Cashman now surmises was the actual tear.
“I suspect yeah,” Cashman said. “My gut is it’s something that dates back to when he started feeling something. In terms of the declaration of the injury, with the physical testing upon the MRIs and where his complaints were, it didn’t reveal itself.”
But Severino kept saying something was there, for months, and the Yankees didn’t run him through the gold standard of MRI hardware to find it before now. That just seems a tad slow for a pitcher fresh off a four-year, $40 million extension who missed nearly all of last season with shoulder and lat-muscle injuries.
Even if it was diagnosed earlier, Severino still is out for 2020. We just have a bigger-picture concern with the Yankees’ process in these situations and what that means going forward. Cashman did his best to downplay Severino’s condition last week, despite casually bringing up a “loose body” in his elbow, and Severino himself didn’t sound too alarmed by what was going on with the forearm.
Instead, Severino becomes the latest worst-case scenario for a team that specializes in them, and the Yankees are making it increasingly difficult to have faith in any of their injury evaluations. Is Aaron Judge’s achy right shoulder really just a minor thing? And what about the next player stricken with a cranky back or stiff forearm? I can hear the sirens going off already.
“I don’t want to sugarcoat the fact that being without Sevy, that’s a blow,” manager Aaron Boone said. “But it doesn’t change our expectations and what we’re truly capable of. So no, nothing changes.”
Medically speaking, nothing has changed for the Yankees. Expect the worst.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
