PROVIDES HOPE

Joe Girardi insisted there was no connection to be drawn, but only hours after the Yankees made it official that James Kaprielian would undergo Tommy John surgery, it was hard to believe that everyone in the organization wasn’t watching Luis Severino and thinking, “Don’t fail us now, kid.”

Now being the next six or seven years more so than Thursday night.

The Yankees, after all, are going to need an influx of high-level pitching to make their rebuild pay off eventually, and some of it will have to be home-grown because Hal Steinbrenner has made it clear he doesn’t want a payroll bloated by dependency in the free agent market.

Privately the Yankees thought of Kaprielian as their can’tmiss pitching prospect, so impressed were they by his polish on the mound and his determination to be great.

And maybe he’ll still be that guy, but in the best-case scenario his arrival time in the Bronx figures to be late in the 2019 season, and perhaps not until 2020, considering he will wind up missing most of three seasons, after trying to rehab the elbow injury last year.

So this was crushing news for the Yankees, all the more so because while their farm system is now well-stocked with touted position players, it is thin on blue-chip pitching prospects.

Maybe Justus Sheffield, Chance Adams, or Dillon Tate will blossom into dependable major leaguers. Maybe Bryan Mitchell or Chad Green will still emerge, and lefthander Jordan Montgomery certainly offered hope in his major league debut on Wednesday that he can figure into the Yankees’ future plans.

For the moment, scouts as a whole don’t seem especially high on any of them as front-of-the-rotation starters, but all of them are young enough to change such opinions _ perhaps even dramatically so.

Indeed, Severino is evidence of how quickly expectations rise and fall. He lost his own can’t-miss status faster than his 97-mph heaters were leaving the ballpark in 2016, but there he was Thursday night against the Rays, reminding everyone why he was a phenom in 2015, seemingly with ace potential.

“People forget how young Sevvy is,’’ Girardi said. “He has a ton of upside and tonight he showed what he’s capable of.”

Severino got knocked around last season as a starter largely because he couldn’t command his off-speed stuff, allowing hitters to sit on his fastball, but on Thursday night he overmatched the Rays’ hitters by throwing a lot of quality sliders to go with a fastball clocked as high as 99 mph.

As a result, he racked up a career-high 11 strikeouts over seven innings, and earned his first win since September of 2015 in a 3-2 victory, with the help of two home runs from Aaron Hicks,

For some perspective, at 23 years old Severino is the youngest Yankee pitcher to record 11 strikeouts since Al Leiter in 1988. Of course, he was also the youngest to get 10 in a game since the immortal Sam Militello in 1992, so obviously high strikeout totals don’t always dictate success. But the timing of Severino’s start was just what Yankees needed, from a big-picture standpoint.

“Slider had much more depth and deception,’’ a scout at the game texted. “Fastball command was only average, but the good slider gives him more margin for error. Could still be a No. 1 with that stuff.”

Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez weighed in with praise as well, saying on MLB Network that Severino had a “great slider,” and perhaps most significantly, Severino seemed to understand why he did.

“Last year I tried to overthrow it, I tried to throw it 90 (mph),’’ he said. “But it’s better when it’s 85, 86. It has a better break and I can keep it down, get hitters to chase it.”

He says he worked hard during the off-season to make his change-up better too, and maybe Thursday night was a sign that he is beginning to mature as a pitcher.

Certainly it is all the more reason he’ll get a long leash as a starter, perhaps even longer now that Kaprielian is injured. The Yankees saw him blow hitters away in short bursts as a reliever last season, even after struggling as a starter, but he’ll have to fail badly again before they consider that option.

“We’ll continue to run him out there and we believe he’s going to do the job,’’ Girardi said. “This kid’s a starter.”

They really don’t have much choice anyway. I don’t think Steinbrenner wants to spend big in next winter’s free-agent market for the likes of Jake Arrieta and Yu Darvish, star pitchers in their early 30s, even with contracts of CC Sabathia and Alex Rodriguez coming off the books. ore likely GM Brian Cashman is going to have to package a few of his position-player prospects for an ace sometime in the next year or so, but even then the Yankees are going to need help from their own young pitching.

They were counting on Kaprielian to lead that charge. But they’d be thrilled if it comes from the Severino they saw on Thursday night.

M