Friends, Romano, Countrymen: Lend Me Your Arms

DALLAS — There’s only so much oxygen available for big-payroll Northeastern teams that are in crisis despite a largely successful 2024 campaign. And the Yankees, as ever, have been sucking up most of the attention. But don’t underestimate the furor that’s been floating around Philadelphia since the Fightins’ ignominious four-game NLDS exit. Dave Dombrowski has been rumored to have his finger in many pots in the first month of the offseason — an Alec Bohm change-of-scenery trade here, a Garrett Crochet blockbuster there — but as of the opening of MLB’s Winter Meetings, nothing had yet materialized.

Well, wait no longer. Longtime Blue Jays closer Jordan Romano is on the Rob Ducey Highway, bound for South Philly on a one-year, $8.5 million contract.

The bullpen was a strength for Philadelphia in 2024, with Jeff Hoffman and Matt Strahm making the All-Star team, and Orion Kerkering having a good case to do the same. Or I should say, it was a strength until it very suddenly and emphatically wasn’t. As unsettling as the Phillies’ offensive outage was, they probably would’ve beaten the Mets had the bullpen not coughed up… let’s see here, I know I have the exact figure somewhere… one gajillion runs in the four games of the NLDS.

There was always going to be some turnover in the Phillies’ pen, with Hoffman and deadline acquisition Carlos Estévez bound for free agency, but is the best solution to a historical meltdown really to throw $8.5 million at a 31-year-old who had a 6.59 ERA in 2024?

Fortunately, Romano’s 2024 stats don’t tell the whole story. In fact, I’d argue that you could write them off entirely. Romano was hamstrung and eventually sidelined by elbow soreness, which ended his season just after Memorial Day — not that Romano, a native of Markham, Ontario, would know what that means — and resulted in arthroscopic surgery in July. That certainly constitutes an injury concern that factored into the Blue Jays’ non-tendering their onetime relief ace, and Romano had to pass a physical. But when all his joints are in working order, Romano is a superb relief pitcher.

And a longtime favorite of certain FanGraphs writers. I interviewed Romano in September 2022 and Ben Clemens followed with an analysis of his repertoire the following June. Both articles focused on one particular — I’d argue unique — attribute: Romano’s extension.

“Wait, he just signed a one-year contract with a new team, why are we talking about an extension?”

My bad. I mean Romano releases the ball extremely close to home plate. In his last full season, 2023, Romano was tied for second — out of 479 pitchers with at least 500 pitches — in average extension. Which makes some degree of sense, because Romano is 6-foot-5 with arms like a wind turbine. A non-trivial percentage of my 2022 article could be summarized succinctly as: “Dang, this guy is tall!”

At the time, I wrote about an obvious advantage of having long extension: Romano releases the ball a foot closer to home plate than most pitchers, and two feet closer than some. That gives the hitter a tiny fraction of a second less to read and react to the pitch, which is probably not news to you, a person who made it below the break on a FanGraphs article. You’ve probably known about perceived velocity for 15 years. And the effect is considerable for a pitcher who throws 97 mph to begin with.

Ben noted another interesting feature of Romano’s delivery, however. A pitcher with his body type and arm angle — 50 degrees, which is on the vertical side of high three quarters — ought to have what’s known as a tall-and-fall delivery. Romano is more drop-and-drive. He gets low, pushes hard off his back foot, and ends up planting his front foot all the way out at the edge of the mound.

Despite his height and arm angle, Romano was only 180th in vertical release point in 2023. That’s not just because of his lower body posture, but because — as Ben noted — the farther forward his foot lands, the lower the mound is at that point.

The lower release point — and lower approach angle — accentuated the vertical characteristics of a pitch that already had more “rise” than the average four-seamer. So now, instead of sinking into the hitter’s bat path, Romano can paint the top of the zone or even work above it to generate whiffs and popups. Add in a hard vertical breaking ball, a pitch that gets tagged as a slider — but which Romano told me he thinks of as a curve — and you have the most stereotypical modern closer possible.

What are the Phillies going to do with him?

Well, Romano is a veteran who saved 95 games between 2021 and 2023, and mostly operated as a one-inning closer. The Phillies tend to have a pretty fluid bullpen model; last season, Hoffman, Strahm, and Kerkering would come in whenever matchups dictated, as did José Alvarado when he was on his game. Whoever got the save was of relatively little importance. Eight different pitchers recorded at least one save for the 95-win Phillies in 2024, and nobody saved more than 13 games.

Romano could filter into that mix, or manager Rob Thomson could use him the way he used Craig Kimbrel in 2023: As a dedicated one-inning closer for save situations outside the high-leverage committee. Except Romano is slightly cheaper, and hopefully he wouldn’t walk the Phillies out of multiple winnable NLCS games. Fingers crossed.

It remains to be seen how Thomson will deploy Romano, and the answer is likely to depend on further signings and trades that are yet to be made. What makes Romano an interesting fit now is that fastball.

The Phillies’ track record for developing talent is not bad, but it’s a bit spotty. With that said, the one thing they do better than anyone else is teach fastballs. And not four-seamers.

Of the five Phillies starters to throw at least 50 innings last season, four — Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Ranger Suárez, and Taijuan Walker — threw three different types of fastball. The only exception, first-time All-Star Cristopher Sánchez, threw almost exclusively sinkers.

Even in the bullpen, where you can get by on two pitches, they like a multi-fastball approach. Nine of the Phillies’ top 10 relievers, by innings pitched, threw a sinker at least 8% of the time. The lone exception was Estévez, who joined the team in midseason. Alvarado threw his sinker to the exclusion of a four-seamer, and his only secondary pitch, if you want to call it that, was a cutter.

Romano throws hard — which the Phillies like — but he does not throw their characteristic pitch. It would not surprise me, therefore, if he spent spring training learning a sinker, cutter, or both to go with his unusual four-seamer.

Alternatively, Romano could answer a criticism of the Phillies’ roster construction — just not in the unit everyone had in mind. If you watched the NLDS, you probably saw the Phillies’ hitters chase a lot, to their ultimate doom. This is an aggressive lineup, Kyle Schwarber notwithstanding, and when the entire lineup is this homogeneous, an opponent who figures out one hitter’s weakness can use that solution against the entire team in a short series.

The Phillies haven’t made a major offseason move to solve that offensive weakness — either by trade, free agent singing, or building a time machine to bring back the peak version of an on-base machine like Darren Daulton or Bobby Abreu. (At least not yet.)

But the charge of fatal sameness could also have been leveled against the bullpen, so it could be that Romano is attractive to this team precisely because he can throw a different look at opponents who might’ve expected Alvarado, or Kerkering’s sinker-sweeper combo.

Either way, you don’t have to think too hard about this one. Romano was an elite closer for three years before he got hurt, he throws in the upper 90s, and he was available for slightly more than backup catcher money. This could end up being an especially productive combination of player and team, representing great value for the Phillies and a platform for a Hoffman-like free agency for Romano in 12 months’ time. But at minimum, it’s a reasonable price for a good pitcher.