On Friday night, the YES cameras caught Joe Girardi in the dugout walking over to chat with Yankees trainer Steve Donohue. A few pitches later, both came out of the dugout to see and ultimately remove Luis Severino.
The timing seemed fishy. Severino was in trouble. Had an injury been concocted to give Nick Goody as much time as needed to warm up? Or to get Severino first to the DL and then to the minors without the hubbub that would surround a typical demotion for the struggling young righty? It didn’t help on Saturday that Severino fluctuated between vague and unsure over the nature of his injury, after the Yankees had announced he was on the DL with a strained right triceps.
But Brian Cashman insisted that there was nothing untoward here.
“It was not a big thing,” Cashman said. “If it wasn’t an injury, then I could have just optioned him to Triple-A if I wanted the roster spot.”
Cashman said when Girardi feels the team might need an arm the next day and wants to make sure the replacement pitcher does not get used at Triple-A, the protocol is for the manager to tell Donohue, who then calls Cashman. Cashman was in the midst of a meeting when he saw the same Girardi-Donohue conversation on YES. He told those at the meeting his phone would ring in 30 seconds with Donohue’s request, and it did.
“We did an X-ray and an MRI, and MRIs are not great for your health, so we are not going to fake that,” Cashman said. “The way the pain was described initially, we thought he had a bone chip in his elbow. The X-ray didn’t show that, so we did the MRI. It did show the signal for a triceps strain.”
Mets madhouse prepared Ventura for anything
Robin Ventura was a Met from 1999 to 2001, which means he was with the organization in a time of Bobby Valentine, Steve Phillips, Bobby Bonilla, Mike Piazza, fake mustaches, clubhouse card games in the midst of a playoff game, Wharton Business School speeches and much more that made those Mets the best soap opera in sports.
The White Sox manager felt that made him better qualified to handle the brouhaha this past spring when club president Ken Williams ended up in a public feud with many of the players for requesting that Adam LaRoche have his son, Drake, in the clubhouse either a lot less or not at all. LaRoche retired and forfeited $13 million over the issue, but what looked as if it might tear the team apart — outfielder Adam Eaton actually called Drake LaRoche one of the clubhouse leaders — didn’t. The White Sox are 24-14 and first in the AL Central.
“It’s hard to explain to people who did not play here [New York] how much [bleep] happens,” Ventura said. “You just get used to crazy things happening and realize no story lasts very long. This [the LaRoche episode] was similar. It is big one day and then it blows over. I joked with [White Sox third base coach] Joe [McEwing, a Mets teammate in 2000-01] how similar it was to the Met stuff. I am glad I learned from the Mets stuff.”