Sporer Report Issue #6 – Romero’s Rising

If you scooped Fernando Romero off your waiver wire on Sunday night, you were paid immediate dividends as the 23-year old righty threw six scoreless innings in St. Louis on Monday night, allowing just three hits and three walks while striking out nine. He now has 11.7 scoreless innings to open his MLB career and has many wondering if he can be a game-changing rookie for both the Twins and your fantasy team. He has consistently been a Top 10 entrant in Twins prospect lists for the last couple years including 7th by Eric last year and will place top five for this year’s list, which is coming soon. Let’s take a closer look at the electric righty.

Romero has a four-pitch mix: sinker, four-seamer, slider, and changeup. The fastballs do most of the heavy lifting, averaging 97 mph with devastating movement on the sinker (or two-seamer… the classification is essentially interchangeable – the bottom line is that he has a second fastball beyond the four-seamer).  The fastballs have allowed just a .174 AVG and .217 SLG over 31 plate appearances with six strikeouts, but also six walks, yielding a .367 OBP. That aforementioned movement can be tough to wrangle and looks like the biggest issue for Romero right now.

A nasty whiff off the 2-seamer:

And then one that exemplifies the feral command (trademark: Nick Pollack) of the wicked pitch:

As GIF-able as that pitch is, it’s not terribly competitive and is easily taken for a ball more often than not. In fact, splitting the results of the two pitches shows that the sinker is responsible for five of those six walks off his heat. Of course, a pitcher can overcome a couple walks when a pitch is remarkably difficult to hit. I think Romero’s off days will be marred by walks and a key hit or two that cashes in those free passes, but I also see days ahead of walking too many, but consistently skirting trouble because his stuff is just so filthy. Something like 6 IP, 2 H, 2 ER, 6 BB, 9 K or as I like to call it: a Bauer.

I used Baseball-Reference’s Play Index to find the starts of two or fewer hits, five or more walks, and five or more strikeouts over the last five seasons and the month-plus of this year and Cleveland’s Trevor Bauer has four such outings, tied for the most in baseball with former Twin Francisco Liriano. Bauer is entering or in the midst of his peak while Liriano is post-peak which is why I leaned toward naming it a Bauer. Wade Miley also has three. Yordano Ventura, Sean Manaea, Francisco Liriano, Ian Kennedy, Felix Hernandez, Cole Hamels, and Tyler Chatwood are the only others with a pair.

Perhaps invoking the name of Liriano is instructive, though, as it’s easy to see some similarities between two despite handedness difference, although Liriano’s walk issues developed a little bit into his career (just a 7% in his first 145 IP; 11% in 1502 IP since). Liriano also lived off mid-90s heaters and filthy mid-80s sliders, though Romero would have to develop his changeup further to really complete the “right-hander Liriano” imagery.

Our prospect team graded Romero’s fastball as a 70 on his player profile scouting report and it will be the driving force behind his success this year. Don’t sleep on the slider, though. It’s graded as a 55 with a 60 future, so it’s a plus pitch as well. Batters have a comical .154/.214/.231 with eight strikeouts in 14 plate appearances. I’ll let the wonderful Pitching Ninja show you its greatness:

Fernando Romero, Filthy 89 mph Slider ? pic.twitter.com/mSfuLbHIuR

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 8, 2018

While Romero works down and away to righties and down and in to righties (aka the way most sliders work), he’s not afraid to drop backdoor sliders on lefties and steal some strikes. Most of the ones I’ve seen him throw have been purposeful as opposed to just a missed target. Check out these two in the same at-bat to Kendrys Morales from his debut:

 

Romero isn’t fully formed, but he doesn’t have to be to have sustained success in the majors. Two plus pitches, feel for a third, tons of swing and miss in said pitches, and a 58% groundball rate I don’t even have time to get into (I don’t know what that means… I just “got into” by mentioning it) lay the foundation for Romero to be a key piece in both the Twins rotation and yours.

He was a huge pickup this weekend and likely had another surge of pickups in daily leagues after last night’s outing, but he should be on a roster in just about every league right now. He may play himself down to more of a deep league option, but the upside is too significant to pass up. He was slotted 101st on my latest SP rankings, just inside the Spot Start tier.

Because they are spot starters, I didn’t meticulously rank that tier as it’s so situational (often dependent on their matchups), but there are still groupings of talent separation within that tier to where his 101 ranking is markedly different than Mike Minor’s at 54. I’m running an update of the rankings this week after letting them breathe for the weekend and Romero will definitely shot up the SS list to no lower than 70.