Blue Jays sign free agent reliver Sergio Romo!
A pitcher who has been cast off by the Mariners? What could possibly go wrong?
MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported on Monday afternoon that reliever Sergio Romo, who was released last week by the Seattle Mariners, has signed a big league contract with the Jays. While ostensibly a minor move, and one that probably doesn’t warrant a full post of its own, I’m going to give you one on it anyway, because there are actually some intriguing aspects to this pick-up. And boy, do the Jays ever need some kind of a pick-up to help them stem the bleeding in their bullpen right now.
Can Romo be that something? The fact that he’s a 39-year-old with an 86 mph fastball who just got dumped by a club that’s 15th in MLB in reliever ERA and below the Blue Jays by bullpen fWAR says probably not. But let’s talk about it!
Sergio Romo has had a nice big league career that, to date, has spanned 15 years. He's won three World Series (all in even years), been to an All-Star Game (though he didn't pitch), and only twice — and not since 2011 — has averaged more than 90 mph on his fastball. He's also a hell of a fun guy to have on your team.
That is, at least when he's doing things like pulling his pants down to make a mockery of MLB's sticky stuff crackdown last summer...
...and not when he's doing the kinds of things that made the above sticky stuff check so absurd (tossing a meatball to career 57 wRC+ hitter Eli White, who then proceeded to hit the baseball 440 feet).
Home runs have plagued Romo again this year, as he surrendered six of them in just 14 1/3 innings. That's not a tenable amount of home runs to give up, and obviously the Mariners agreed.
Thing is, Romo did a very solid job for the Marlins and Twins back in 2019, posting a 3.43 ERA over 60 1/3 innings, striking out a batter per nine, and finishing the season with a 3.68 FIP. He was serviceable in the following two seasons in Minnesota and Oakland as well, but the bottom has fallen out so far here in 2021. Not only have the home runs plagued him, but the strikeouts have dried up somewhat. He has just 11 of those in those 14 1/3 innings. Romo continues to do a decent job of limiting hard contact — since the start of 2021 his 21.8% hard hit rate ranks 12th among all relievers — but this year the hard hit rate on his slider versus left-handers has crept up to 40%, which likely explains why he's using the pitch against them less than in any season since 2015.
If you want to be kind to him — and evidently the Jays do — you could point to his absurd 27.8% HR/FB rate against right-handed batters so far, which in a lot of cases you might just assume is unsustainable. When we're talking about a pitcher of his vintage and velocity, however, that's not such an easy leap to make.
Granted, Romo did look a lot better than this as recently as last season. His ERA for the year was 4.67, but he held both lefties and righties to identical marks of .305 wOBA. As the league average wOBA in 2021 was .314, I guess that means he was slightly better than average!
In fact, in 2021 his Statcast percentile rankings actually didn’t look all that bad.
I suspect that if he’d pitched enough to qualify in most of these categories this year his rankings would be quite a bit uglier, but that’s not nothing, I suppose.
And as much as the lack of velocity makes it scary, he’s been flipping sliders and making batters look silly for a long time. Here’s how he was described in the 2021 Baseball Prospectus annual, for example.
Like an ultimate frisbee player vainly chasing a disc, batters are still reaching for Romo's slider and catching nothing but air. You would think the best players in the world would have cracked this particular case by now: Romo's only weapon is a long but relatively slow sweeping breaking ball. Odds are, if it starts on one side of the plate, it's going to end up on the other. If you're a lefty and it looks like it'll fly over the adjacent batter's box, dust off your "slap this one foul" swing, because it's probably coming in the back door. And if he tries to catch you flat-footed with a fastball...well, it's only 85 mph these days and, as all the Twitter experts have decided, eighty-poo is nothing to sweat. The veteran keeps ticking along though, and while you could speculate that a slight velo downtick is cause for concern, we're not ready to do so. Father Time comes for 'em all eventually, but Romo struck out more than 10 per nine, suggesting he still has another year or two in the tank.
The velo downtick described was from 86.6 in 2019 to 86.0 in 2020. This year he's bounced back a little, to 86.2. Does that matter? Who knows? It certainly didn't for the Mariners, but I do think it's worth it for the Jays to take a look, tinkering with what they can tinker with, and seeing whether or not it was just a blip or if this is really the end. As I said in the subheading: a pitcher who has been cast off by the Mariners? What could possibly go wrong?
And you want to know something funny? When I went to check out the box score for the only All-Star Game that Romo was ever involved in, I saw a name that I had actually already been thinking about. The National League's final pitcher on that night back in 2013 at Citi Field in Queens was Jason Grilli.
Now, anyone who remembers 2016 could tell you that Jason Grilli was a very different pitcher than Romo is. He wasn't exactly a flamethrower, but pumped fastballs at 93-94 and had an out-pitch slider that kept batters honest. A guy like that is more of what the Blue Jays fans probably were — and, let’s be honest, still are — imagining as the type of pitcher the team would bring in and help this bullpen. But… well… you take what you can get when you can get it. A free look a Romo for as long as he makes it worth keeping him on the roster? Why the hell not? It’s not like this is the end of the Jays’ quest to improve their relief corps. (Though I’ve done this long enough to have known for sure that Brendon here was going to get people who thought this tweet was actually serious. LOL.)
As for Grilli, while he’s different in type his acquisition was fairly similar in concept.
The Jays acquired Grilli from the Braves for a pitcher named Sean Ratliff — a Canadian! HOW DARE THOSE CLEVELAND CRONIES DO SUCH A THING! — who lasted all of one inning in the Braves organization and then was out of baseball.
At the time, Grilli was much closer to genuine success in the majors than Romo is now, having pitched to a 2.94 ERA for the Braves in 2015 before succumbing to an Achilles injury that also seemed to have affected his early-season performance the following year. The Jays — because, as is seemingly the case every goddamn year under Shapiro and Atkins, their bullpen needed mid-season help — pounced when they had an opportunity to get him while his early-season ERA sat at 5.29 and he was walking nearly seven batters for every nine innings. Then, behind continued improvement in health, a tweak here and there, and a change of scenery, Grilli emerged as one of the Jays' most important relievers for a significant stretch of that summer as they clawed their way to a second straight ALCS appearance.
Should anybody expect the same outcome for this Romo experiment? Absolutely not. But the cost here is just as minimal. They’ll simply have to remove someone from the 40-man to get Romo onto the roster. (I suspect this will be Shaun Anderson, who was activated here on Monday to take Jeremy Beasley’s place in long relief, with Beasley optioned to Buffalo and Hyun Jin Ryu being transferred to the 60-day IL to free up a spot 😞).
There is, of course, opportunity cost to be considered. A lot of fans have been keeping their eyes on Buffalo’s Adrián Hernandez — he of the mighty screwball (which is also sometimes just called a changeup). Hernandez has has struck out 28 batters in 20 innings for the Bisons so far this year, while walking just seven and producing a 1.80 ERA. Both the reports and the visuals on him have been pretty good, too.
Like Romo, albeit with a different arsenal, Hernandez isn’t an overpowering reliever. His fastball sits just 90 to 92, but the screwball is so good that as long as he can throw the heater for strikes — something he struggled to do early on in his minor league career — he keeps hitters out of sorts.
“It’s a really good pitch, it just really baffles hitters," Buffalo pitching coach Jeff Ware told SI’s Mitch Bannon earlier this month. "They don’t see spin like that too much, so when they’re in the box and they see this changeup coming it’s not like anything they’ve seen before, so it really does keep them off balance.”
Whether it will have the same effect on big league hitters remains to be seen, of course. But… uh… I’d sort of like to see it, wouldn’t you?
The thing is, taking a look at Romo doesn’t preclude Hernandez from eventually getting the call. Since he’s yet to be added to the 40-man himself, Hernandez may in fact be in line to take Romo’s place should the veteran falter. Going one-a-time with these guys obviously does less to help the Jays right now — I mean, why not both? — but given the constant churning of guys like Beasley, Anderson, Casey Lawrence, Matt Gage, etc., and the incredibly frustrating need for long relief innings they’ve had lately, I suppose I can understand why they’re not rushing to give spots to too many one-inning guys all at once.
The good news here is that at least some form of help is finally on the horizon. The question is, will it even help?
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Ryan Borucki for Sergio Romo?
Always good to acquire elite talent.
Good God, I can't believe Romo is still pitching, there's nothing left in the tank. I always appreciated it when opposing teams trotted him out of the bullpen for our hitters to tee off on, which they did with remarkable consistency and enthusiasm.
And now he's ours...ugh.