Sergio Romo Made a New Mistake

If everybody in baseball were better at execution, offense would go down. Though the hitters would be improved on talent, hitting is reactionary, and if pitchers could more consistently hit their spots, it stands to reason there would be far fewer dingers. Pitches aren’t usually called in dinger-friendly areas — home runs, commonly, come out of mistakes.

Sunday night, the Cardinals went deep four times against Giants pitching. Matt Carpenter clobbered a Jake Peavy fastball that drifted out over the plate. Oscar Taveras got out ahead of a Jean Machi splitter that never dropped. Matt Adams punished a high Hunter Strickland fastball that, if Strickland had his druthers, would’ve been higher. And then Kolten Wong was the hero in the bottom of the ninth, taking advantage of a Sergio Romo mistake. And for Romo, it was a mistake he hadn’t made.

You’ve seen the swing, so now see it again, without sound or context or visual of the result:

It was a pitch down and in, that was supposed to be more down and less in. You know how this works: most often, pitchers — and especially relievers — try to work opposite-handed hitters low and away. Sure enough, that’s what Buster Posey wanted, and sure enough, that’s what Romo tried to execute, but the thing about humans is we screw up an awful lot of the time.

That’s one look. Here’s the opposite:

You see from the .gif that the pitch was 84 miles per hour. Consider what you know about Romo. If you’re a Giants fan, you know a hell of a lot, but if you’re not, you don’t. Romo’s known for his slider, but the pitch is slower than this, mostly hanging out in the upper 70s. And Romo isn’t a reliever with a blazing fastball, but he also doesn’t exactly have a Mark Buehrle fastball, so this pitch was somewhere in between. What could be in between a slider and a fastball? For Romo, that’s changeup territory.

Matt Kawahara:

“Changeup,” Romo said, standing by his locker. “Down the middle.”

He continued:

“Bullpen felt fine, I went in there confident. Did I expect to throw it down the middle? No chance.”

You don’t see that many relievers throwing three or more pitches, but Romo has folded in a changeup more often to try to counter what he perceived to be a growing platoon split. This past spring there were tales of Romo getting his changeup absolutely pounded, but he still brought the pitch into the season, and here are Romo’s year-to-year changeup rates against left-handed hitters (Brooks Baseball):

This season, one out of four. Basically double the previous season’s rate. Against Wong, Romo didn’t try something experimental. He tried to disrupt Wong’s timing, but he missed in pretty much the worst possible place.

Wong has fastball bat speed, and he’s able to drive good velocity out over the plate. Against slower stuff, he has more pop down or inside, as he’s capable of adjusting mid-pitch. Like most hitters, he tries to hit fastballs up the middle or toward the opposite gap, so if he gets something a little slower, he can get the bat head out in front and yank the ball to the pull side. If a pitcher keeps that slower pitch away, the hitter will often tap the pitch on the ground, if not miss it entirely. But Wong was swinging for a fastball over the plate, and he got a changeup over the inner third. As they say, that sped up his bat, and he pulled a line drive 370 feet.

Here is Romo’s 2014 changeup distribution to left-handed hitters, shown here from the catcher’s perspective:

For the first time this year, Romo threw a changeup in that low-inside square. Mostly, Romo was good about keeping the changeup down or away, out of the zone. The pitch frequently went for a ball, but better a ball than a hittable strike. Romo didn’t leave many changeups over the plate, so to him and Posey, they were probably thinking the worst-case scenario would be a changeup that drifted too far outside, evening the count. You can’t blame them for not considering an outcome Romo hadn’t had.

Romo had just gotten ahead with a first-pitch fastball. In a way, this indicates the danger of making a mistake in a pitcher-friendly count. Some league-wide in-zone swing rates, from Baseball Savant:

Even: 57%
Batter ahead: 65%
Pitcher ahead: 82%

Batters get super aggressive when they’re put on the defensive, because they don’t want to strike out or get even deeper in the hole. With the count 0-and-1, Wong was likely to swing at anything close, whereas, for example, if the count were, say, 1-and-0, Wong might take a changeup over the plate. In the image above, you see three changeups from Romo left middle-middle. Those definitely weren’t good changeups, but none of them were thrown with Romo ahead in the count. So there was a lower likelihood of a swing. Here are Romo’s career changeups with the left-handed batters behind:

I’m guessing you can spot the pitch to Wong. It’s the most hittable pitch in the whole set, somewhat in and somewhat elevated, allowing a fastball swing to get in front and set a trajectory for the right-field seats. Sergio Romo doesn’t have a great changeup. He has a perfectly serviceable changeup, that’s only a few ticks away from his fastball. Most of the time, he can keep the change away from a lefty, or he can keep it below the zone. Against Wong, he did neither, and so for the first time in Romo’s career, his changeup got taken deep. The previous dingers, all fastballs or sliders. The pitch Romo used to keep hitters off the other two dared to enter the wrong part of the zone, and when a mistake finds a hitter’s happy spot, it doesn’t really matter what the mistake is.

In the AL playoffs, a team that didn’t hit homers has been hitting a lot of homers. In the NL playoffs, another team that didn’t hit homers has been hitting a lot of homers. And in the NL playoffs, a pitcher who didn’t make one kind of mistake just got burned by that very kind of mistake. Welcome to the MLB playoffs, Sergio Romo’s changeup. This is a time where nothing has to make sense.