Will Sergio Romo Ever Pitch in the Majors Again?

The persistent uncertainty over when (or if) MLB will have a season in 2020 continues to invite questions about the futures of almost every player, in various ways. One of the most serious and potentially painful forms these questions take pertains to longtime veterans in their late 30s. In the case of Twins reliever Sergio Romo, it’s a reasonable (though cruel) question: will he ever pitch in the big leagues again?

At first blush, that might seem a foolish question. Romo had a terrific second half with the Twins last year, and signed a contract for 2020 that includes a team option for 2021, at an affordable $5 million. Under the surface, though, there are signs that Romo, one of the best relievers of his generation, is headed for troubled water, even if and when baseball resumes.

Among hurlers with at least 500 innings pitched since 1950, Romo has the 20th-best career DRA-, according to Baseball Prospectus. He’s in virtual lockstep with Max Scherzer. Obviously, Scherzer’s role as a workhorse starter makes him much, much more valuable than Romo, a one-inning reliever, but the fact remains that Romo has been a dominant pitcher (perhaps more so than most people even realized) for over a decade.

He does it in a few ways, and the details shift with each passing year, reflecting the right-hander’s savvy and willingness to evolve as he ages. For one thing, while his four-seam fastball sat at just 86.5 miles per hour in 2019, he spun it at over 2,300 revolutions per minute. His low arm slot and the way he releases the pitch preclude him from getting the rising action pitchers look for when spinning their fastball so efficiently, but the spin isn’t wasted: both his four-seamer and his sinker have exceptional run to the arm side.

Romo threw his changeup more often last season than ever, helping him extend a trend of neutralizing left-handed batters better late in his career. He hardly ever throws the pitch against righties, but to lefties, it’s become a steady part of the diet, a pitch he throws fully 30 percent of the time. It has enough velocity separation from his sinker to fool batters, despite strikingly similar movement, and crucially, he adjusted his targets after joining the Twins. He began hitting the bottom of the zone with his sinker, and absolutely burying his changeup, as never before. Batters were slow to adjust, and he got plentiful whiffs from the pitch down the stretch.

Then, of course, there’s that slider. Romo unabashedly drops down and gets around the pitch, which drops less than his sinker and only slightly more than his four-seamer on the way to the plate. Its spin effectively mirrors that of his sinker, though, and the 20-inch difference in their horizontal movement makes misreads by opposing hitters costly mistakes.

Great lateral movement, but minimal vertical separation, tends to beget weak contact rather than swings and misses, and while Romo’s strikeout rate has sagged recently, he was one of the best hurlers in baseball at avoiding hard contact in 2019.

Why, then, do we say there are signs of trouble? For one thing, Romo’s become an extreme flyball pitcher. For another, he’s avoiding barrels by nibbling on the edges of the strike zone. His command and control remain solid; he just doesn’t have the sheer stuff to attack within the zone anymore. When hitters do swing, despite getting less desirable pitches to hit, they are making contact more and more often. Even with good command, the willingness to throw his slider over 60 percent of the time, and improved depth on his change, Romo is becoming a more comfortable at-bat, because he utterly lacks the ability to overpower big-league hitters.

Even with his sterling showing for the Twins mixed in, Romo had his worst season in 2019. For the first time ever, he registered a DRA- above 78—and it was 95, meaning he was just five percent better than an average pitcher. His cFIP, a more skill-centric and predictive measurement of a pitcher’s performance, was 101, meaning he was (if anything) worse than average. Meanwhile, as teams develop increasingly advanced player development tools, the importance of lost games for minor leaguers still on the way up the chain is diminishing.

Whenever baseball resumes, top prospects with big stuff are going to be much less affected by the layoff than those of old veteran hurlers, even though those hurlers, like Romo, will benefit marginally from not bearing a year of wear and tear. Romo’s competitive advantage over young arms was already shrinking rapidly; it might disappear entirely before 2021 begins.

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