Archive for the ‘Ricky Romero’ Category

Ricky Romero used to be good. Then he was bad. After unfair comparisons to the quickly developing players in his draft class, Romero emerged in 2009 as a promising young southpaw with one of the better off-speed pitches in baseball. In 2010, he made good on this promise, producing a good enough season to give fans a semblance of hope in a year that would otherwise feel dreadful for its sudden absence of previous staff ace Roy Halladay.

In 2011, it all clicked. Romero was trending in the right direction in terms of strikeouts, walks and ground balls. Buoyed by a low BABIP and high strand rate – numbers typically attributed to events outside of a pitcher’s control – the Blue Jays ace finished the season with a career high in wins and an ERA below three.

Given the somewhat disappointing results of the rest of the young and inexperienced staff, Romero’s performance stood out as something that was actually encouraging to fans, and presumably to management, who prior to his breakout year, had locked up the left-handed pitcher’s services for the next five seasons at the seemingly low cost of a guaranteed $30.1 million.

Then came 2012.

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Well this is slightly newsworthy:

#BlueJays option Ricky Romero to Dunedin

— Shi Davidi (@ShiDavidi) March 26, 2013

The Halladay treatment! Except, almost certainly with less of a total overhaul involved, though we don’t know that just yet. Alex Anthopoulos is to speak with reporters this evening in Dunedin to address a decision that, despite the ugly look of it, probably makes more sense than having him trying to work out whatever is wrong with him with a Buffalo club that’s trying to be competitive in their own right. The warm weather in Dunedin can’t hurt, either.

Mike Wilner confirms the obvious, which is that J.A. Happ will now be the club’s fifth starter, while Barry Davis tweets that Alex Anthopoulos told reporters that Romero just ran out of time to get himself together.

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Ricky Romero will make a pre-season start once more after today, but it’s hard to envision him being able to pull his spring out of the fire if this afternoon’s outing against the Pittsburgh Pirates goes tits up. So, with that in mind, I’m going to live blog every pitch of today’s outing, which can be heard via this page at this page at MLB.com.

Sound about right? OK, then, let’s do this…

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Arash Madani of Sportsnet was in Dunedin today to follow Ricky Romero’s minor league start– in which last year’s Opening Day starter was scheduled to go five innings– and… um… it went about as well as the comments section on yesterday’s Lou Piniella post.

Below are Madani’s tweets, and while– like the title says– they’re pretty grim, they do need to come with the caveat that– as much as this was the completely transparently built-in excuse– he was working on new mechanics and nobody could have honestly expected him to have a Cy Young-calibre performance waiting to come out of him after a couple of tweaks. But yeah, it’s grim.

Anthopoulos, #Bluejays asst GM Tony LaCava and pro scouting director Perry Minasian are here to watch the Romero minor league start. #Jays

— Arash Madani (@ArashMadani) March 21, 2013

#Bluejays pitching coach Pete Walker & bullpen coach Pat Hentgen also watching the Romero start. He’s given up three hits so far in the 1st.

— Arash Madani (@ArashMadani) March 21, 2013

4 hits, 2 runs, both earned, one walk and a wild pitch in a 19-pitch opening first inning from Romero, who faced seven batters. #Bluejays

— Arash Madani (@ArashMadani) March 21, 2013

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When Ricky Romero came out in his first start of the spring throwing sinkers, nobody had any idea that’s what he was doing. The team certainly didn’t announce it to the world, and I suspect would hardly have made mention of it had it not been for the questions raised by his sluggish velocity and imprecise command. Had the results been better the sinker experiment may still have come up in the course of the day’s reporting, but for lack of a better term, the way it was offered was as an excuse.

And, magical space daddy’s honest truth, at the time that was fine. Here’s what I wrote following the game, which I witnessed first-hand in Dunedin:

It’s hard not to, but I think it would be slightly cruel of me to put Ricky Romero’s effort on the day down in the “ugly” category, especially since it’s still damn February, and his struggles are supposedly due to the fact that he was trying to throw sinkers– a pitch he went away from considerably in 2012, as Brandon Morrow supposedly pointed out to him, via Brooks Baseball. Neil Davidson of the Canadian Press, via the Globe and Mail says as much in his piece on the lacklustre outing, though the Globe’s own Jeff Blair gives a slightly different take, seeming as though he’s trying to pull back from the edge of sounding too many alarms, but evoking 2012 Brett Cecil and the “it’s early, everything is fine” song and dance that went along with his spring struggles a year ago. Of course, it is too early to portend doom for anybody, but rather than divert us from a simple sub-par outing, my sense is that the flimsy excuse-making coming from the Jays probably makes us focus undue attention on a relatively meaningless spring debut. Because, I tell you what, I was sitting directly pretty behind the plate, and if Romero was throwing sinkers all day, by the end they sure as shit weren’t sinking– they weren’t real close to the strike zone either, from my vantage. I can buy that explanation for the lack of velocity for now, but for me it’s certainly going to put more scrutiny on his next outing, not less. Though I guess that was inevitable anyway.

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