One Cause for Optimism in Cincinnati

The Reds’ pitching staff was absolutely dreadful last year. Their rotation and bullpen were both the worst in baseball. With a ghastly -0.5 WAR, their staff was the worst since the 1800s, which basically means it was the worst of all time.

Not much has changed since last year. Here’s the current depth chart for the Cincinnati rotation:

Name IP K/9 BB/9 HR/9 BABIP LOB% ERA FIP WAR
Brandon Finnegan 171.0 8.2 3.9 1.4 .297 73.0 % 4.42 4.66 1.4
Anthony DeSclafani   136.0 7.7 2.4 1.2 .305 72.8 % 4.06 4.14 1.9
Scott Feldman 133.0 6.1 2.6 1.3 .305 69.6 % 4.65 4.65 1.1
Robert Stephenson 119.0 8.9 5.5 1.5 .301 71.8 % 5.07 5.25 0.5
Bronson Arroyo 117.0 5.0 2.2 1.8 .299 68.8 % 5.34 5.44 0.1
Homer Bailey   93.0 7.6 2.8 1.2 .309 70.7 % 4.37 4.27 1.1
Cody Reed 81.0 8.3 3.1 1.3 .306 72.8 % 4.24 4.38 0.9
Tim Adleman   37.0 6.6 3.0 1.5 .300 70.3 % 4.90 5.03 0.1
Austin Brice 19.0 8.0 4.2 1.3 .306 70.8 % 4.79 4.88 0.1
Amir Garrett 9.0 7.9 4.7 1.3 .303 71.6 % 4.77 4.94 0.1
Keury Mella 9.0 6.4 4.2 1.4 .306 69.1 % 5.27 5.32 0.0
Nick Travieso 9.0 6.4 4.0 1.4 .301 69.4 % 5.12 5.23 0.0
Total 933.0 7.4 3.3 1.4 .303 71.3 % 4.62 4.72 7.4

Brandon Finnegan is at the top, which is fine, I guess. After that, however, things go downhill in a hurry — especially with Homer Bailey and Anthony DeSclafani slated to open the year on the DL. For example: both Bronson Arroyo and Scott Feldman are apparently not only still pitching, but are penciled in for 250 innings in Cincinnati’s rotation. The rest of the list is made up of unproven youngsters. Each of them has some promise, but none have had much success in the major leagues, either. Hence their middling projections.

But there’s yet another unproven youngster — one omitted from the depth chart above — who almost certainly merits more attention. That’s 22-year-old Sal Romano, owner of a 1.69 ERA and 16 strikeouts in 10.2 innings this spring. Though he’s only made one start, Romano has averaged nearly three innings per appearance. On Sunday, he struck out seven batters in 3.2 innings of work. The 6-foot-5 righty is making a strong case for cracking the Reds’ Opening Day roster, and pitching coach Mack Jenkins has taken notice.

He was outstanding… Not just the pitch quality, but he’s changing and learning so quickly here about not overthrowing. We saw a few today where he was up, and man, he went down right away. That was exceptional. That was the best outing we’ve had from anyone all spring.

Now, we all know that spring-training performance is only slightly predictive. But Romano’s appeal goes much deeper than what he’s done in March. He was also sneaky good at Double-A last year, where he struck out 22% of batters faced while walking just 5%. Starting pitchers who can dominate Double-A at age 22 aren’t all that common. Romano’s exploits earned him a spot on the All-KATOH second team.

KATOH pegs Romano for 3.5 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 2.8 WAR by KATOH+, which integrates Baseball America’s and Eric Longenhagen’s rankings. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Romano’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

To put some faces to Romano’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Romano’s performance this year and every Double-A season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp. Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

Sal Romano‘s Mahalanobis Comps
Rank Player Mah Dist KATOH+ Proj WAR Actual WAR
1 John Lackey 0.28 2.6 23.9
2 Danys Baez 0.36 2.5 5.5
3 Matt Wagner 0.36 2.4 0.2
4 Victor Santos 0.37 2.3 3.8
5 Tony McKnight 0.39 2.9 0.6
6 Jeff Karstens 0.39 2.0 3.4
7 John Thomson 0.45 2.4 13.7
8 Jason Brester 0.49 3.3 0.0
9 Adam Pettyjohn 0.54 2.3 0.3
10 Jae Kuk Ryu 0.57 2.3 0.0

Seeing John Lackey’s name atop the list is exciting, even if Danys Baez, Victor Santos or Jeff Karstens are more realistic outcomes.

Romano isn’t just one of those soft-tossers who gets by on deception. In fact, he’s far from it. As Eric Longenhagen noted in his Reds list, Romano can run his fastball up to 98 and complements it with a good slider.

A massive righty with a heavy, downhill mid-90s fastball in the 93-96 range (that will touch 98), Romano also has a sharp, slightly above-average slider that’s he learned to locate consistently to his glove side. Romano’s command improved in 2016 and he throws more than enough strikes to continue to start, though some look at his long arm action, the visible effort in his upper back during delivery, and wonder if eventually he’ll need to move to the bullpen where he’d probably be touching 100. His changeup is behind, too, but he’s improved his slider and command somewhat late during development (huge, northeastern body so not really surprising) and has an idea how to use his slider against lefties. I think there’s a chance Romano makes it as a No. 4 or 5 starter. If not, the fallback option could be the ninth inning.

Romano’s most obvious drawback is his lack of a third pitch. His fastball is nails and his slider can miss bats, but it’s tough to navigate through a big-league lineup multiple times with just two quality pitches. While Romano does throw a changeup, Eric gave it a current 40 grade on the 20-80 scale, with a future grade of just 45.

Let’s pull up another set of comps. Using Romano’s scouting grades from MLB.com, we can find comparable prospects from Jeff Zimmerman’s database of historical prospect grades. While the comps above were generated with Romano’s performance (which has been great), the ones below have more to do with how he achieves it (which has been suspect). See below his top comps from 2015 and earlier.

Sal Romano’s Scouting Comps
Prospect Year Publication Fastball Curveball Changeup/splitter Control/Command
Sal Romano 2017 MLB 65 55 40 50
Hunter Harvey 2014 MLB 65 55 45 50
Tyrell Jenkins 2014 MLB 65 55 45 45
Anthony Ranaudo 2014 MLB 60 60 45 50
Hunter Harvey 2015 MLB 65 55 50 50
Sean Newcomb 2015 MLB 65 55 50 50
Archie Bradley 2015 BA 65 55 50 45
C.J. Edwards 2015 MLB 65 60 50 50

This list gives us a back-end starter in Bradley, a dominant reliever in Edwards, and a couple of duds in Jenkins and Ranaudo. In the wait-and-see category, Harvey and Newcomb could still conceivably blossom into productive starters, though their stars are fading.

Perhaps Romano’s changeup never materializes and he’s nothing more than a late-inning reliever long term — a la Danys Baez or C.J. Edwards. That would still be a great outcome for a team’s No. 15 prospect and a phenomenal one for a 23rd rounder. Given his stuff and success in the upper levels, that looks like a pretty likely floor. For now, though, Romano is (more or less) a starter with a realistic chance of breaking camp with the Reds. He may not have the full-fledged endorsement from the scouting community, but he’s a 23-year-old with good stuff who’s succeeded at every level through Double-A. He’s earned the opportunity to prove himself at the highest level, and the Reds might be just desperate to give him him a whirl in their Opening Day rotation.





Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.

7 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
ashlandateam
7 years ago

This is super tough, not just for Romano, but for Amir Garrett (who’s more well known and has, perhaps, a higher ceiling). The rotation for the Reds is abysmal and injured; there’s no reason, performance wise, to NOT just let the young kids have their shot. Contractually and with service time concerns, there’s every reason not to.

I really wish at some point MLB would do something about the service time shenanigans. What that something could be, I don’t know. But it’d be nice for teams to be able to think purely about the on field product instead of contracts and service time for rookies instead of what we have now. Not just in Cincinnati, of course, but everywhere.