Everybody (In Canada) Loves Jordan

Jordan Romano is one of the best closers in baseball, but you wouldn’t know it from perusing your average sports page. He’s a quiet star, in the mildly pejorative sense often implied by “quiet” — not well-enough known, not well-enough talked about, somehow lacking in whatever je ne sais quoi that makes you a star.

Here’s the thing, though: that’s silly. At FanGraphs, we try to avoid that very way of thinking, and yet we’ve written almost nothing about Romano in the past few years. An interview here, a hockey anecdote there, the occasional fantasy piece — it’s not what you’d expect from a guy at the top of the bullpen hierarchy for a playoff team. I’m not kidding myself; this article is Canadian fan service. Let’s talk about what makes Romano so dang good, and ignore why audiences in America seem to ignore him.

If you’re looking at it from a pitch perspective, this one is pretty easy. Romano is good because he throws a hellacious fastball and backs it with an above-average slider. His fastball is a work of art. All the things you’ve heard about what makes a four-seamer good? He has them. He avoids the dreaded line of normality that plagues some heaters that underperform their radar gun numbers; his is mostly up-and-down. Per Baseball Savant, his fastball drops 1.7 inches less than the average four-seamer thrown with similar velocity and also gets 2.4 inches less arm-side fade. In other words, when he throws it to a righty, it ends up less inside than they expect, and also meaningfully higher.

As Romano explained in that aforementioned interview, he’s always gotten great extension. He’s 6-foot-5 and lanky, his delivery all arms and legs flying everywhere. Despite that height, he releases the ball fairly low to the ground. Everyone raves about Spencer Strider’s low, long-stepping release, and yet Romano releases the ball lower despite a five inch height advantage. Gerrit Cole? He’s shorter than Romano and yet releases from a higher point. That’s because Romano steps so far down the mound that despite an over-the-top delivery, he’s low to the ground by the time he lets go of the ball.

Here’s what I’m talking about in action:

And as a point of comparison, here’s another 6-foot-5 pitcher with an over-the-top four-seamer:

That extension does a few things for Romano. First, he’s releasing the ball closer to home plate, so batters have less time to react. Second, releasing an up-and-down fastball from a lower starting point means it travels home on a flatter plane. I talk about vertical approach angle fairly often here, and Romano is a standout in the field. He’s not quite Jacob deGrom, but his four-seamer approaches with an angle among the 15% shallowest in the majors.

Shallow angles mean bundles of swings at the top of the zone, and that’s the whole point of four-seamers. Those swings come up empty frequently — 35.9% of the time so far this year, to be exact. That’s the tenth-best mark in baseball, and the third-best among pitchers who have induced at least 100 swings (Félix Bautista and Luis Castillo are the two ahead of Romano). He’s always gotten a pile of swinging strikes, but this year represents a new high for him.

That fastball is the key to Romano’s game; it fits his delivery perfectly and downright bamboozles opposing hitters. But it’s not even his most frequently thrown pitch anymore. The threat of that explosive fastball means that his slider, which looks more solid than overpowering in a vacuum, carves hitters up just as ably.

Stuff models agree that the slider is pedestrian; it gets a 51 on PitchingBot’s 20–80 scale and a 108 Stuff+ grade. It’s neither particularly sweeping nor particularly dropping, though it does boast a good amount of downward movement given its velocity; most sliders thrown around Romano’s velocity have either negligible downward movement or upward movement (ignoring gravity). It doesn’t miss an otherworldly amount of bats or anything like that either; his swinging-strike rate is in the 57th percentile across the majors, hardly elite status.

Counterpoint: so what? When you already have one great pitch, anything average or better plays up, because it just gives hitters more to worry about. Romano commands the pitch well, to boot. If you’re worrying about a fastball up, a slider that starts from a similar spot and drops below the zone is going to be a nightmare:

One benefit of having a slider with less horizontal movement is that Romano doesn’t need a third pitch to use against lefties. In fact, his two pitches are pretty much north/south, platoon-neutral offerings, which lets him simplify his arsenal. For his career, he’s been meaningfully better against lefties than righties, though I think that’s more a sample size issue than anything else. One thing seems clear, though: he’s not helpless against opposite-handed hitters, which is a nice thing to have in your high-leverage arms.

With those two pitches playing off of each other so well, Romano’s 30% strikeout rate feels about right. He’s also commanding them better than ever before in 2023; his 6.4% walk rate is a career low. It’s the result of an underrated skill: when he’s behind in the count, he’s attacking the strike zone, with a career-high 59.4% zone rate. That’s not spectacularly high or anything, but he’d previously been zone-averse when behind in the count, and now he’s staying in the count more frequently.

If this sounds like a cookie cutter late-inning reliever profile to you, you’re not wrong. What sets Romano apart is his durability. Relievers just don’t stay good for long; they get hurt, lose effectiveness, or otherwise fade away. Romano is eighth in fWAR among relievers so far this year. He was 16th last year and 33rd in 2021. That means he’s been, on average, a top 20 reliever in baseball for three years. The only other reliever who can say that is Emmanuel Clase (who checks in at sixth, second, and 12th; he’s really good). When you look at it that way, Romano’s performance stops being cookie cutter and starts being exemplary. It’s so, so hard to consistently succeed as a reliever. The samples are small, the edges are smaller, and there are a boatload of guys with similar stuff waiting in the wings if you falter.

Will Romano keep this up? I’d be lying if I said I knew. Josh Hader looked unsinkable for years before posting a clunker (66th among relievers) in 2022. Giovanny Gallegos looked like a member of the Always Good Club until 2023. So did Collin McHugh. Kenley Jansen was lights out in 2021 and has been again in 2023 but was merely solid in 2022. Sustainable excellence is never guaranteed.

Even without predicting the future, though, I feel comfortable saying this much: Romano is one of the best relievers around, even if you don’t hear his name as often as you should. If you think about him that way — as mini-Clase, or perhaps a steadier Craig Kimbrel or Camilo Doval — you’ll be a lot closer to the truth than if you just write him off as another flash in the pan.