The Pensacola Blue Wahoos rotation began the year as arguably the most stacked rotation in all of minor league baseball. Nick Travieso, Jackson Stephens, Sal Romano, Amir Garrett and Rookie Davis began the year as the starting five. Davis currently finds himself on the disabled list with a groin injury, but the other four guys are still going strong in the rotation for the Blue Wahoos.
The four guys remaining from the opening day rotation have been posting some outstanding numbers, particularly in the strikeout column. As a group, those four pitchers have 196 strikeouts in 193.0 innings pitched, good for a strikeout rate of 24.2%. The non-Pensacola teams in the Southern League are striking out 19.3% of opposing batters, which means that those four starters have a strikeout rate that’s 25.4% higher than the league average.
Among that group of starters, all of whom are sending opponents back to the dugout with the bat in their hands quite often, it’s Sal Romano who has the highest strikeout rate of the group. The big right hander has struck out 55 of the 219 batters that he’s faced this season, good for a strikeout rate of 25.1%. It’s easily the best strikeout rate he’s ever posted in a season for his career. Of course, it’s just May, so there’s a lot of baseball to still be played. With that said, what’s he’s done through two months of starts stand out for his career. Let’s look at his month-by-month strikeout rate for his entire minor league career:
Looking at the chart we can see that the final two dots represent April and May of this season. They are the 4th and 1st highest months of his career in strikeout rate. In the 2nd and 3rd highest months (May and July of 2014), he saw big drops in the following month. He’s never put together back-to-back months with a strikeout rate higher than 20% until 2016 and the fact that he’s been able to do so at the highest level he’s played is a very good sign.
The 22-year-old Connecticut native has long been known as one of the better groundball pitchers in the system. Every year of his career he’s had a groundball rate over 50% and often over 55%. High rates of grounders and high rates of strikeouts don’t tend to come from the same pitchers. The reason is usually pretty simple: 2-seamers and sinkers don’t generate swings and misses, but they do generate grounders. 4-seamers do tend to generate swings and misses, but they also lead to fly balls. It’s a rare mix that you find a guy with strong groundball rates and high strikeout rates.
So, have the groundball rates for Sal Romano declined as his strikeout rate has jumped up in 2016? Not really, no. His current groundball rate on the season is 53%. That is down a little bit from the 57% he was at last year, and the 55% from 2014 – but overall he’s still a high rate groundball pitcher. There’s an obvious difference between Double-A and the Major Leagues in terms of talent, and we know that not all stats translate seamlessly from one level to the next. But just for a fun exercise, let’s look at the pitchers in Major League Baseball from 2015 who had both a 50% groundball rate and a 22% strikeout rate or higher:
- Dallas Keuchel
- Tyson Ross
- Jake Arrieta
- Felix Hernandez
- Carlos Martinez
- Gio Gonzalez
- Yordano Ventura
- Kyle Hendricks
- Carlos Carrasco
- Francisco Liriano
- Clayton Kershaw
That’s the list. Out of 119 pitchers with at least 120.0 innings pitched, 11 of them were able to induce groundballs at least 50% of the time someone made contact and strike out at least 22% of the batters they faced. Look at that list of pitchers. It’s a who’s who of starters in baseball. Only one pitcher, Yordano Ventura, had an ERA that was over 4.00 from the group (4.08 for the Royals).
As noted, it’s not always a seamless process to carry stats forward from Double-A to the Major Leagues. The talent gap between the two levels is enormous, but 22-year-old Sal Romano is showing a very interesting set of skills for the Pensacola Blue Wahoos right now, that if he is able to carry forward with him as he continues to develop, bodes quite well for his future.