5:38PM Wednesday
March 13, 2013

It might be hard to believe this after Sergio Romo closed out the World Series and probably wrapped up the stopper role going forward for the Giants and Team Mexico, but there was a time when the prognosis for his career was much more negative. After all, he's a small righty (five-foot-ten and a buck-eighty-five) with a fastball that doesn't normally crack 90 miles per hour who throws his slider more than half of the time. Given what we might know about injuries and platoon splits, there was probably one role waiting for him in the bigs: ROOGY.

But Sergio Romo is not a Righty One-Out GuY. I asked him why.

"It's all about having confidence in my stuff and my abilities," said Romo when I asked him about platoon splits and his approach against lefties. At first blush, that seems like an evasion. We know that sliders have one of the worst platoon splits of any pitch, and so it's unlikely that the reliever would continue to throw the pitch more than half of the time against lefties. An...