Ricky Romero

Now, the walks to me where if I'm nitpicking are the pitches where maybe it's a four-pitch walk, and every single pitch is six inches to a foot outside of the strike zone.

Those are the ones where you're not even letting the batter –

give themselves a chance to get themselves out, if that makes sense.

So those are the walks, to me, that I'm like, you've got to try to eliminate those.

But I'm okay with certain walks in situations.

If you're trying to throw a particular pitch, maybe it's a slider, you're trying to get somebody to swing and chase at a slider, and sometimes they just don't swing at it.

And you know what?

That's okay.

You go ahead and put them on.

But, yeah, when you get to the bottom part of the order and it's a four- or five-pitch walk, those are the ones that I feel like when you talk about him –

not commanding the zone, people kind of go to those types of walks.

Now, to me, I almost feel like because he can be so wild, it makes it really difficult to decide what you want to go after because, yeah, I can say I want to go after this pitch, whether it's a fastball or a slider, but is that pitch going to be in the zone?

I don't know.

But it's another element of –

challenging batters with not just the velocity not just with the spin and the movement but also the the idea of well is is this going to be a pitch that's even going to be close to the zone that i can hit i i just i put myself in the batter's box too and i i think of those things but and this is how you end up with while he's all over the place why are you swinging it so and they swing at 60 percent of the sliders out of the zone yesterday yeah yeah and and i

We talked a lot about the change-up yesterday, and I know that it was funny.

We had Mike Petriello on the show, and he's talking about how, metrically, it's not the best pitch.

It's not the best change-up.

And I completely agree with him in what he said, that he feels like it makes his other pitches better.

And something about the speed difference, and when you're looking at 97, 98, and all of a sudden something's coming in there at, what, 81, 82 miles per hour?