Yankees: Can Domingo German turn into the next Luis Severino?

Someone should set up a booth at Yankee Stadium and ask fans who this stat line of a 2-6 record and 5.83 ERA once belonged to. Is it Domingo German or Yankees ace Luis Severino?

You can almost guarantee that most Yankees fans would choose Domingo German — especially since he was recently sent down to the minors. To their surprise, though, they’d be wrong.

Back in 2016, it was a year of growing pains for Luis Severino. Unlike the some of the current starters of the less successful crosstown Mets, Severino didn’t hit the ground running. It was more like every time he started running; he’d fall right on his face and give up six runs to Texas, seven to the White Sox, five to Boston and then seven to Tampa Bay.

If you look back far enough, tweets were yelling for Severino to see that dreaded DFA.

We all know how Severino’s story ends. He’s the ace of this Yankees staff and is now running a successful Cy Young campaign. It took some time away from the team and meeting baseball’s Yoda, the great Pedro Martinez, for him to finally get his career on track.

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Right now, it’s difficult for a lot of people to be positive about Domingo German. But in some ways, compared to the old Sevvy, he’s almost there.

You can even say German had a better 2018 than Severino did in 2016. You can’t forget the game in Houston where Jordan Montgomery went down, and German held on for four scoreless innings. He was thrown into the fire and left unscathed against the champion Astros. You also can’t forget his follow-up contest where he no-hit the first place Cleveland Indians for six innings.

The young man was lights out.

Those were the kind of outings that made you feel positive about German’s future in New York — and while we quickly got accustomed to seeing him get lit up after that, we should still feel good about his potential.

It was a relief to see German sent down to the minors last weekend because the Yankees can’t afford to lose much more ground to the Red Sox. But in the grand scheme of things, we should be celebrating the fact that we have a future No. 2 guy working out the kinks to go behind Severino potentially.

All German needs is more time in the minors and maybe a Yoda of his own.

German’s consistency is something an organization with 27 championships and a knack for finding historic talent can be easily fixed. Instead of having 4.1 great innings against the Braves and then falling apart as he did on July 3rd, a few tweaks can make a lackluster start become a gem. German can go seven innings, have 10 strikeouts and a make a potent Braves offense look like the Mets.

Sadly, that July 3rd start against the Braves was German’s short Yankee career in a nutshell. A long flash of excellence followed by a quick simmering.

All the Yankees have to do is figure out how to remove the meltdown inning from German’s game.

Right now, his time in the majors is like reading the Great Gatsby and instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s perfect shocker of an ending, you have a lousy conclusion that falls off the rails where aliens invade, and Gatsby has to save his beloved Daisy Buchanan from a hoard of half insect, half reptilian beasts. It’ll take a team of the most brilliant editors — and the Yankees have that — to make this talented young man put it all together.

As it stands, German’s strikeout per nine innings is at 10.4. In 2016, Severino’s was at 8.4, and if you look at where an elite pitcher like Chris Sale is at for most of his career, he averages about 10.8 per nine innings.

It’s those good innings as well as the fact that he has the potential to be one of the game’s strikeout kings, right behind Severino and his AL East counterpart in Sale, that you can’t write off.

Each day articles and tweets are written about how the Yankees need pitching and right here, we have our pitcher of the future. All he needs is patience, the way it was afforded to another guy who struggled at the beginning of his Yankee tenure like Aaron Judge.

The Mets and their fans boast about how they have such a great pitching staff, and they’re right. There’s no doubt that Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard are elite but give it a few years. The only thing the Mets have will be overshadowed by our one-two punch of Sevvy and German.

Everyone will have forgotten that this Yankee team has holes in the rotation and by then, the shadow of the 90s will be in the past, and this team of Bombers will be the new gold standard.

There will undoubtedly be another struggling player who’ll get hammered by fans and the press, and the Yankees Universe will have to be patient with him the way they were patient with German.

As we speak people smarter than everyone in the baseball world are most likely working tirelessly to make this happen. They will rebuild German. They’ll make him stronger. They’ll make you want — to buy his jersey.

They’ll make him one of the Yankee greats.