Yankees, Mets face innings questions: Gil, Scott, Severino

Not that long ago, around the same time Luis Gil’s Tommy John recovery progressed through its early stages and Christian Scott made the minor league leap from High-A to Double-A and Luis Severino grappled with struggles that eventually would cause him to declare he was the “worst pitcher in the game,” a New York City baseball team faced another innings limit conundrum.

This one involved Clarke Schmidt, the reliever-turned-starter who kept throwing five innings here and five innings there for the Yankees in 2023 and watched his pitching odometer skyrocket past previous highs. Three starts from 2022 turned into 32. His 57 ⅔ big league innings became 159.

So it was natural, as the starts and months piled up, for the topic of an innings limit to be broached. Schmidt wasn’t exactly following a blueprint. But the Yankees let Schmidt work through the growing pains, and he started regularly all the way through the two four-inning outings that capped his 2023 ledger.

This year, Gil, Scott and Severino pitched their ways into similar dilemmas. That, at its root, is a good problem for the Yankees and Mets to have, but they won’t all lead to the same ending.