There is paint on the field, flags on the steel and uproar in our sensations. Without a doubt it is the opening day. Well, at least the third.
The most iconic trap of Opening Day is the fleet of excellent starting pitchers who take the mound. Each team sends the best, or at least the healthiest. For some, he is the current Cy Young winner. For others, it is a precocious perspective. These starters, true to their name, carry the weight of the new season on their shoulders.
Few carry a greater burden than Luis Severino.
Atlético is at the top. They rank 20th in projected WAR from FanGraphs Depth Charts and enter Opening Day with about a 16% chance of making the postseason, according to our playoff odds. It seems unlikely that this will be their year, but in fact they are young, talented and on the rise. It wouldn’t be too surprising if they remained in the playoff picture well into September.
If they do, it will be because of their alignment. It’s good. They finished 10th in wRC+ last year and are back in virtually the same group. In his rookie season, Nick Kurtz made a case for being the game’s next great slugger. Shea Langeliers finished with the second-highest wRC+ by a catcher at 131. Brent Rooker posted his third consecutive 30+ home run season. Jacob Wilson and Tyler Soderstrom played well enough to earn extensions early in their careers, and Lawrence Butler got one the year before.
Our depth charts project the A’s hitters at 14th overall by WAR, but they’re less than one win away from cracking the top 10, right in the next tier behind the Dodgers and the handful of truly great lineups in all of baseball. It’s a playoff-worthy group.
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The problem? The A’s are unbalanced:
His pitch is bad. They finished last year in the bottom five by WAR, and we don’t project them any better in 2026: Their starters ranked 24th in our positional power rankings, while their bullpen ranked 26th. I don’t know if I’d call them terrible (they’re still a rung or two above the Rockies), but there’s not much to set them apart.
To be fair, it’s difficult to project pitching groups over the course of a season, as injuries and small sample sizes encourage attrition. The bottom of the A’s roster doesn’t look much different than the bottom of many rosters in the soft middle of our projections. I could believe Luis Morales has a great season, just as I could believe Jeffrey Springs and Aaron Civale are decent backends. And, you know, bullpens are weird, sometimes in ways that work in your favor! Still, there is no one who is an obvious candidate to post an above-average value and take this group to the next low.
Except maybe Severino. He’s done it before.
Severino was once a big deal, although almost a decade ago. He was a highly touted prospect and a top-five pitcher by WAR in 2017 and 2018. He had the classic, simple arsenal of a guy with big stuff: a 98 mph four-seam fastball, a killer slider, and a changeup just to be honest. No one threw harder and few struck out more batters. In 2018, he was only 24 years old.
Then, as these things happen, he was injured. Severino missed almost all of 2019 due to a shoulder injury. He then missed all of 2020 and most of 2021 due to Tommy John surgery. He pitched fairly well for half a season in 2022 before being sidelined with a latissimus dorsi strain, then pitched fairly poorly for half a season the following year while dealing with a latissimus dorsi strain and an oblique strain. He pitched just 209.1 innings in five years.
Severino signed a tryout contract with the Mets ahead of the 2024 season, and proved to be… well, good enough to sign a three-year deal with the A’s in December. It was a surprising move because the A’s are notoriously stingy. But it was also a perfect move because the A’s needed someone who could potentially be a top-line starter to lead the staff. And there simply aren’t many pitchers available in the A’s price range who have proven capable of posting five-win seasons, especially those willing to play in a minor league ballpark.
That minor league ballpark, of course, was a big part of Severino’s first season in Sacramento. He didn’t really like pitching there and told him The Athletic both in June.
“It’s not the same environment. We don’t have a lot of fans. Our clubhouse is in left field. So when we play day games, we have to just be in the sun. There’s no air conditioning there either. It’s really difficult.”
Now, I’m not going to call Severino a liar. I’m sure he really didn’t like pitching in Sacramento. When he offered that quote, he had a 6.79 ERA in 10 home starts and a 3.04 ERA in eight road starts. That’s a big divide! But Severino also had a 4.36 FIP at home and a 4.34 FIP on the road in the same stretch; his fundamental ability was not much different. As the season progressed, so did he; He posted a 4.26 ERA and 4.28 FIP in five home starts from July onward, compared to a 3.00 ERA and 3.20 FIP on the road. I’m willing to attribute much of Severino’s early-season home performance to bad luck: his .342 BABIP and 58.2% LOB rate were in the bottom five among starters through June. That seemed to self-correct as the season progressed.
In other words, yes, Severino was generally worse at home, and we could expect him and the rest of the A’s staff to be worse while working against what ended up being the fifth-highest park factor in the majors last year. It’s a minor league park, it’s very hot and the wind blows; It’s not easy to launch there. But perhaps there is a tendency to overstate the extreme of Sutter Health Park. What we saw in 2025 was nowhere near Coors Field, and I think I’d classify it more as a nuisance than a barrier to a quality pitching season.
No, Severino’s merely decent performance in 2025 was his own doing. He posted the lowest strikeout (17.6%) and strikeout (18.3%) rates of his career. It is part of a downward trend that has been going on for years in any of the categories.
Because?
A great pitcher who declines after an injury is usually dealing with some type of velocity drop. That is the case of Severino, but not entirely. Again, he was once the hardest starting pitcher in the game, averaging 97.6 mph on his four-seam fastball in 2018. He dropped to 96.1 mph on his four-seam fastball in 2025. That’s a significant difference, but he still boasted one of the 15 fastest four-seam pitchers in baseball last year. In fact, Severino’s poor performance rate on the field jumped from 20.2% in 2018 to 21.9% in 2025 (although still below his 2017 mark of 24.0%).
But he’s no longer limited to throwing four seams:
Severino now has a contemporary arsenal. He still throws a lot of fastballs, but some of them are now sinkers for righties and cutters for lefties. These tend to be a little slower. If we look at his average speed on all straightaways, it actually dropped to 95.4 mph, or 2.4 mph less than in 2018; his overall fastball sniff rate last year was just 16.7%. Severino also abandoned his sharp, biting slider in favor of a slower, looping sweeper. The pitch produced a foul rate of just 22.8% in 2025. It is still a good pitch overall and appears to produce poor contact (i.e. weak fly balls and weak fly balls). But Luis Severino’s “37.6% odor index in 2018” is simply not good.
Now, maybe these trade-offs are worth it. It is not entirely fair to compare the Severino of 2025 with himself from seven years ago. Continuing to throw the same three-pitch combination may not have the same effect today as it did when you had that extra top gear. But the sum total of these changes is a slower, more contact-oriented approach. Last year, Severino had trouble getting ahead in counts and finishing hitters.
If he is the one who is going to move forward, that’s fine. He’s still an average pitcher worth giving 30 starts a season in almost any rotation. Still, I can’t help but feel there’s room for something more. He throws hard, has good control and is still Luis Severino. He looked electric for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, throwing fastballs in the upper 90s and dominating Team USA’s fearsome lineup.
What will we get in 2026? Well, we’re about to find out. Severino will begin his 11th season in the majors on Friday at age 32. The odds are increasing that he has another ace-level season, but he wouldn’t be the first or the most unlikely pitcher to have a late-career resurgence. If he can find the next level again, the A’s will surely follow. That’s the beauty (and burden) of Opening Day.
