Going their separate ways, Yankees and Luis Severino have found success

In baseball, you’ll sometimes hear about win-win trades, deals where both sides make out well. Those are always fun, but there are other ways in which a player can depart a team that leaves all parties involved better off.

Once upon a time, what feels like ages ago, Yankees fans everywhere foresaw Luis Severino as this team’s long-term ace. Severino was one of the most dominant arms in the American League, earning Cy Young votes in 2017 and 2018, and then injuries happened.

Severino eventually got back to the mound in recent campaigns, in and 2022 he showed great promise, but things went off the rails last year. Sevy seemed unable to reconnect with the approach which saw him earn tremendous success earlier in his career, getting crushed to the tune of a 6.65 ERA. Towards the end of his tenure, we saw disagreements between him and the organization about how to handle his return in 2023.

Coming into this last offseason, the Yankees had question marks regarding their rotation. Despite those questions, the possibility of a reunion with Severino was never truly considered. Ultimately, that was probably a good thing for both sides.

It’s not difficult to point to Severino’s awful 2023 and say that signing him didn’t make sense. That being said, this is the same team that went out on the market and signed Marcus Stroman to a longer and more expensive deal than anything Severino would or eventually commanded. The point is, it wouldn’t have been that surprising to see Sevy back with the team in an alternate reality.

Yet in that alternate scenario, it’s easy to imagine things shaking out differently within the Yankee rotation. If Severino was still around, would Luis Gil have had the same opportunity to force himself into the conversation? Could Clarke Schmidt have found himself on the outside looking in after an uneven 2023? Ultimately, the Yankees have to be happy with how things shook out. With Sevy gone, Gil slid into the rotation when Gerrit Cole went down and is in the midst of a breakout season, while Schmidt looked excellent before hitting the IL last month.

And moving from the Bronx has seemingly been a positive for Severino himself. On the fringes of the Wild Card race or not, the Mets find themselves in a transitional period, and Severino took a one-year deal to almost reinvent himself, and that he has done. He’s thrown the sinker much more in Queens, finding success with it running in on right-handed hitters. His outstanding of yesteryear isn’t on the table anymore, evidenced by his poor 17.4 K%, but a very respectable 3.52 ERA is a major step up from last season.

How reliable this new version of Severino is remains to be seen long-term. But this felt like the right time for each party to go their separate ways, and that’s turned out to be precisely the case.

The Yankees won’t see their former starter during this two-game set as he just pitched on Sunday Night Baseball against the Cubs, but as the Yankees trek trip to Citi Field, it’s nice to see Severino’s doing well. It was a vintage night on Sunday for Sevy as he shut down the Cubs with six scoreless, striking out 10. He flashed his new approach, with the sinker his most used pitch. It all goes to show, sometimes, a mutual parting of ways can be best for everyone involved.