All In
I don't know you much but I woke up feeling like I
wanted to stir you up. Let us all escape reality for a moment and enter the
portal of anarchy. If you're an employee let's pretend your boss is out of town
and crank up that music. You are married with kids but they left town so go
ahead and pee with the door open. You live at home and your parents just caught
a cab to the airport so go ahead and finish uploading that picture of the empty
house on Instagram. Whatever your scenario is, it's time to eat some forbidden
fruit.
After we celebrate our temporary freedom, blurry
lines transition our space into a scene out of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
You know the kind. That hidden room located on the other side of his walk-in
closet that reveals a glorious amount of weapons. He bypasses the grenades,
machine guns and even big Bertha that shoots actual nuclear missiles. The
knives that can cut a deer in half, nothing disrupts his focus. His tunnel
vision leads him to the stand up cabinet located at the far end. He begins to
turn the dial. Though he often never does, he remembers the combination like a
scarred memory of the past. Finally the door is unlocked; he slowly opens the
door and reveals.....Luis Severino.
He is the diamond in the rough. That special
"save it for a rainy day" thing we have under our mattress, in the
fridge or in the bank. He is the Yankees number one prospect. Joel Sherman
wrote an article reporting how one scout mentioned "there is zero doubt
that Severino is better than guys who are in the Yankees rotation now." He
reported another scout stating "He’s got No. 2 upside and should at least
be a quality No. 3 starter." Yet Severino stands behind a glass in the
minor leagues that reads "break in case of emergency".
If we have respectable scouts commentating so
strongly on this prospect than I'd like to ask you a rhetorical question. How
many base runners heading to first base would be considered safe if first base
was 89 feet away as opposed to 90? In the grand scheme of things 1 foot seems
relatively small but when factoring baseball and base runners we talk about
rallies that could have been.
As it stands right now, the American League East
holds no wiggle room. Besides the Red Sox, every team is clawing for first
place. As the Yankees have been trading positions with the Rays, the Orioles
have risen and taken possession of first place by mere percentage points. While
the fight for AL East supremacy continues, Luis Severino is pitching a line of
3 wins with zero losses, a 1.73 ERA, 24 strike outs in 36.1 innings of work.
Although I am only sharing his recent work since being promoted to AAA, to me
it does seem to translate into that difference between 89 and 90 feet. Severino
can be a difference maker.
For all you conservative folks who don't have an
adventurous bone in your body and forgot to read that Schwarzenegger paragraph
with dramatic music in the background, I will share my rebuttal to your
reserved ways. Since 2006 there has been a steady decline of league batting
averages. In only our 87th day of the 2015 MLB season we have seen 2 no hitters
and 16 cases of close encounters with pitchers reaching 6 innings or more of no
hit baseball. I'm not trying to undermine the quality of hitting in the Majors
but if you were looking for a soft spot for Severino to land on, look no more.
Our movie is coming to a close, the anarchy is
fading. There you sit with pen in hand, cell phone beside you and no one to
hold you responsible. What's your move....
Article by: Danny Valentin
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