TAMPA — This is where the seeds are planted, just past 9 o’clock in the morning on the first day in weeks when the temperature wasn’t already careening toward 80 degrees. Cool but comfortable. Sunny and bright. Quiet except for the occasional car horn randomly blaring off Dale Mabry Highway.

Here, you don’t only see Luis Severino pitch a simulated game.

You hear it, too.

You hear Larry Rothschild calling balls and strikes — using his pitching coach voice, too, not needing his umpire’s voice. You can hear the quartet of hitters who serve as the sim-game foils kicking the dirt out of their spikes, grunting as they swing, occasionally offering a familiar, terse commentary: “Nasty.”

And, of course, you hear the POP!

Only, it’s more than just a pop. There should be a better word available for the sound of a Severino fastball hitting the pocket of a catcher’s glove, especially in the quiet of a Saturday morning. All pitchers pop the glove. Junkballers, spitballers, forkballers: You hit the right part of the mitt, you’ll get a pop. Hell, if a TV microphone is close enough in the bullpen, every pitch from every pitcher sounds like rifle fire.

But Severino’s pop is a step beyond that, especially when he is on. And this morning, in his second sim game of the spring, he is beyond on.

“Everything was working,” Severino will say a few hours later, his workday complete. “I was feeling good. My fastball was really live.”

We dutifully offer up these numbers even though it is only fair to point out that this was a simulated game. If spring training games are fake games, then sim games are fake-fake games, a handful of fielders behind a pitcher to shag balls and that’s it. When Eddie Feigner brought the King and his Court softball club to a rec park near you, he was playing a game that more resembled a real baseball game than this. End of disclaimer.

The numbers: 47 pitches, 37 strikes. Three innings (though because he was so sharp, he recorded 11 outs, seven of them by strikeouts). Yes, in a sim game you can invent extra outs, do a lot of pretending, have imaginary baserunners. It isn’t Game 7 of the World Series.

But it can get your mind racing.

It can get your imagination whirring.

Because the simplest sights and sounds of a sim game like this one can make you remember what Severino was in 2017, as electric a young pitcher as there was in the game, 31 starts and 191 ¹/₃ innings, 230 strikeouts, 14 wins in 20 decisions, a 2.98 ERA and so many games when he was still throwing 99 mph on his 100th pitch of the day. For much of the year he was a clear Cy Young contender; he finished third.

He was 23 years old.

So at 24, it is fascinating to speculate what may be ahead of him. The Yankees want to protect their most precious pitching commodity, have asked him to ease into the spring even as he hungers to face live hitters at 1 in the afternoon rather than statues at 9 in the morning. It sure seems like the Yankees want him to be the Opening Day starter. And that he wants the honor, too.

But he has simpler goals, too.

“I want to be healthy all year, I want to pitch 200 innings and I want to help the team as much as possible,” he said. “And I want to work on all my pitches.”

They were all working Saturday, no asterisks necessary. He muscled up on fastballs that shaved corners and kneecaps. His slider was sharp, his change filthy, his control almost scary. The other thing about sim games is that they tend to turn the pitching coaches calling balls and strikes into the late Eric Gregg, expanding strike zones as necessary to allay his pitcher’s confidence.

Not necessary here. Rothschild could’ve used a zone as big as the thimble piece in a Monopoly game and Severino would’ve hit it.

Not bad for a fake-fake game. Up next: Just a regular fake game, and soon enough the real ones, and a chance for Severino to remind the world that the Yankees aren’t merely the home office for tape-measure moonshots.