Archive for the ‘Ricky Romero’ Category

The Fan 590′s Prime Time Sports has taken its show on the road to Dunedin this week, which has meant for a tonne of Jays coverage, including back-to-back interviews on Wednesday with a much more articulate and intelligent-sounding Brett Lawrie than we tend to give him credit for around here, and Ricky Romero, who offered some interesting insight into his struggles and his health– and at the very end made sure to sneak in some praise for J.A. Happ, too!

Especially interesting, in my mind, were his statements about his knee troubles, and the platelet rich plasma injections he received in the off-season, which you can see transcribed below. Or you can listen to the audio here– including the chat with Brett Lawrie, as well as one with Matt Smoral (whose name was being pronounced with emphasis on the “a”). Romero’s segment starts at the 14 minute mark.

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Granted, it’s a relatively routine procedure– Dr. Lewis “Heathcliff” Yocum performed arthroscopic surgery to “clean up his left elbow,” according to a team release– but Ricky Romero went under the knife this week, and “PRP treatments to both knees to enhance the recovery of his quadriceps tendinitis.”

Yes, those PRP treatments– platelet-rich plasma– are what caused the career-threatening injury to Jesse Litsch last spring, but they too are rather routine.

Romero, we’re told, will need about six weeks to recover. So, he’ll be long ready for next spring, assuming all goes well.

Now then, what do we make of this?

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On most days around this time, I’d be tossing up an Afternoon Snack post, but let’s be honest, right now there are really only two things in the Jays-a-verse worth discussing, and everybody’s already talking about them: Ricky Romero’s continuing struggles, and the talk Alex Anthopoulos gave to assembled reporters before last night’s game. So I’ll focus in on those, beginning with what we all saw take place last night…

As we all can see from the picture above– and the GIFs in Archi’s Post Game Graph– there is more to the story of last night that merely what I call “Ricky Romero’s continuing struggles,” as his eye-rolling, petulant reaction to being pulled from the game may have sent other managers *COUGH* John Gibbons *COUGH* into a frothing, punch-throwing rage.

The look of disbelief on Farrell’s face says it all, doesn’t it? Sure, maybe it’s a bit too much to ask a pitcher who so badly wants the ball to fully process what was going on in the heat of the moment– that his manager was trying to spare him, and trying to take him out proactively at a point where, once the dust had settled, he’d be able to look back on the game in about as positive a light as possible– but… seriously, Ricky?

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Ricky Romero was terrible again last night, and I’m finding it about as hard right now to grope around for something new and interesting to say about it, as it is to try to make sense of how the latest turd fits into the pile of them our Opening Day starter has been laying out behind the shed all damn summer.

Seven hits. Eight walks. No strikeouts.

Putting the game into historical context, before calling it “a tortured cry for help,” Jeff Sullivan writes at FanGraphs that the last pitcher to post a worse ratio of walks-to-strikeouts “was Jose Guzman, at 9:0, in 1991. Before that, you’d have to go back to 1971, and before that, you’d have to go back to 1951. The most recent starter to post a ratio of 8:0 was Greg Reynolds in 2008, and the less said about Greg Reynolds, the better. Before that, the most recent 8:0 start happened in 1982.”

Jesus.

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