TAMPA — The path isn’t always clean, isn’t always uncluttered, isn’t always straight. Opportunities come when they come. They happen when they happen.
“Nobody is happy that Sevy is hurting,” Jonathan Loaisiga said in the Yankees clubhouse, maybe 90 minutes after completing his first case to replace Luis Severino for as long as that may be necessary. “But we all have our jobs to do.”
Loaisiga learned these lessons quickly, of course, and often. In 2014, ’15 and ’16, he appeared in a total of exactly one game, for Charleston of the Single-A South Atlantic League, in which he allowed two hits and two runs in 2 ¹/u2083 innings and promptly disappeared for another 13 months to have Tommy John surgery.