“After three years here, I’m like, this is it, man, this is my place,” Hernandez said. “When you work somewhere and you feel comfortable, you don’t want to leave. You want to stay there forever.

“Something about it, this place, it got me pretty good.”

On Tuesday, Hernandez is scheduled to start against Sabathia at Yankee Stadium. Hernandez is 5-2 against the Yankees on the road. He liked the old stadium, all the noise, all that history, more than the new version. But he drew a distinction between the allure of playing in New York and playing for New York.

He pointed at the pattern on his black shirt. Stripes, he noted. Not pinstripes.

In recent years, hardly a day passed without some speculation that Hernandez would be traded. The general manager, Jack Zduriencik, even created a running gag. He knew to expect the question at banquets or community functions or whenever he spoke to reporters, so he would excuse himself and pretend to answer his phone and say: “Hello? No, no, we’re not trading Felix.”

The calls came anyway, one after another, especially as each season wore on and the losses piled up and the cycle of perpetual rebuilding continued unabated. The temptation, a tradition as old as baseball, was to deal Hernandez for a host of prospects. Zduriencik insisted he never wavered.

Hernandez signed with the Mariners in 2002, at age 16. He knew only two things about Seattle: that Freddy Garcia, a fellow hurler from Venezuela, pitched for the Mariners, and that it often rained. Garcia opened a tab at a local restaurant and told Hernandez to eat there any time he wanted.

The protégé rose through the Mariners’ system with the speed of one of his 100-mile-an-hour fastballs. Daren Brown, now an assistant with the Mariners, had Hernandez in Class A ball in San Bernardino, Calif., for half a season. In one contest, Hernandez notched seven innings and the opposition hit one ball out of the infield.