BOSTON — In taking playful jabs at his friends and former teammates, Luis Severino was not taking shots at anyone behind their backs.
Gleyber Torres was on the text thread on which Severino said he was not afraid of the Yankees because “right now, you only have two good hitters.”
Severino was ribbing his good friends, but good jokes often communicate a certain truth.
And the truth is that Torres had been having an awful contract season.
But if there is hope for a third, in-house hitter to emerge on a team that has been too dependent on Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, the best bet is with Torres, who is just 27 and not far removed from being one of the best second basemen in the game.
The Yankees and Torres hope he has begun to turn a corner.
Since a two-game benching in late June that manager Aaron Boone termed a “reset” — following both a rough slide and a particularly rough game in a loss to the Mets in which Torres made a key error and did not run out a ground out — the Torres of old has reappeared.
In 80 games before the break, Torres hit .215 with a .628 OPS.
He raised those figures to .237 and .681, respectively, over the next 19 games, including a 3-for-5 night with a double in the Yankees’ 9-7 loss to the Red Sox on Friday night.
“Hopefully those are little victories that help get a guy settled,” Boone said before beginning the series at Fenway Park. “When you’ve had a year when it’s not up to what you’ve done in the past … the game gets real hard and mental and you’re fighting through different things and trying to make adjustments.
“But it’s also those little small things sometimes that can start to snowball and get you clicking and back to the player we know you are.”
Boone has talked with Torres over the past week and reminded him of the player who he is — a two-time All-Star who arguably was the Yankees’ most consistent hitter as recently as last season.
During the first three months of this season, Torres was unable to get going and slid from leadoff toward the bottom of the order.
The recent downturn of the other hitters not names Judge and Soto has shined a spotlight on Torres, who is the type of slugger who can get hot and offer real lineup protection.
Torres was bounced up to leadoff on Wednesday before sliding into the No. 5-hole Friday.
“I like what I’ve seen the last couple of days, I’ll say that,” Boone said of Torres. “And I felt like [Wednesday], I just felt like his energy was good. His presence in the box was good.”
The numbers have begun to tick back up in what is personally the most important season of his career.
Torres will hit free agency at year’s end, and the second half of this season will play a large part in the kind of contract offers he gets.
During the Subway Series, Severino glanced up at the scoreboard and saw Torres’ stat line.
Severino has not spent a ton of time watching the Yankees because he has been busy with the Mets, but he could tell Torres has been having the kind of contract season that Severino himself had last year, when the then-Yankees righty pitched to a 6.65 ERA.
Severino plans on talking to Torres about free agency at some point.
If Torres’ uptick continues, that conversation would be much lighter.
“We haven’t talked about that yet,” Severino said. “But I think the opportunity will come, maybe in the offseason when everything’s over.”
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