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Ricky Romero walks around his Toronto home in the middle of the night, closing the blinds and turning off all the lights, one by one, until the place is pitch black and completely silent. He stops in front of his bed and sits on the floor, crossing his legs and looking up into the darkness. He sits like that for hours, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, as the same two questions keep running through his head, like a record tauntingly stuck on repeat. “What is going on? What can I do?” He doesn’t have an answer for either of them.
Tonight, he gave up eight runs against Oakland. It was his sixth loss in a row. He was booed off the field when his manager took the ball from him in the second inning and the bullpen was so taxed from cleaning up his mess that the backup catcher had to pitch the ninth. He’s ashamed. He’s embarrassed. His thoughts torment him; they echo off the walls.
After the game, he called his parents at the large Downey, Calif., mansion he bought them after he signed his $30-million deal in 2010. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone at the moment, but he calls them after every start and they would worry if they didn’t hear from him. In the back of his mind, he hopes they didn’t watch the game tonight. That maybe they had to take his little sister somewhere or that the cable cut out just before the first pitch. But of course, they saw the whole thing.
Mom starts crying. “Son, it hurts me so much,” she says between sobs. “It hurts me to the bottom of my heart to hear people booing you.” Sandra Romero is a kind, unjaded woman. She can’t understand why her son is so disliked now. She was at opening day on April 1, 2011 when Romero struck out seven in a 13–3 win. He walked off the field in the seventh inning to a standing ovation from 50,000 people. That was just a year ago.
Now he’s in the middle of the worst season he’s had in nearly a quarter-century of playing baseball. With every passing start, he has a little less grip on his cutter; a little less grip on his confidence, a little less grip on his emotions. Eventually, the season becomes one dreadful six-month outing, instead of 32 independent starts. He can’t wait for it to be over. He wants to get as far away from it as he can. It gets harder to sleep; harder to wake up the next day and feel normal. He keeps telling himself he’ll get through it. He tries to block out the fear, the anxiety, the doubt. But things keep creeping in.
“Let it go,” he repeats to himself as he sits there in the dark, over and over. “You’ve got to let it go.”
Almost a year after that sleepless night, Ricky Romero thinks he’s finally ready to let it go.
To get a grasp on how close Ricky Romero’s life came to not even happening, you have to start sometime in late-1970s Chihuahua, Mexico, where his father, Ricardo, grew up. Ricardo’s mother died when he was just five and his father had a disposition for disappearing, sometimes for years at a time. Other family members took him in but soon they too began to fade away, several of them consumed by alcohol. Ricardo knew he had to get out of Chihuahua if he was to make anything of his existence, so, at just 17, he gave a professional smuggler nearly all the money he had to sneak him into the United States.
The man drove Ricardo across the border to El Paso, Texas, where he got on a bus that took him 12 hours west to East Los Angeles, where his uncle lived. Ricardo pieced together what little work he could considering he couldn’t speak English and, according to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, did not exist. One of the first things he did was join a baseball team coached by a hard man from Tijuana named Miguel who migrated to the U.S. legally in the 1960s to work as a contract labourer. Miguel had a daughter, Sandra, who regularly attended the games and quickly hit it off with Ricardo. On Nov. 6, 1984, at just 16, Sandra gave birth to her first of four children. They named him Ricardo Jr. But everyone called him Ricky.
Ricardo and Sandra raised their family—which grew with the births of Sandy in 1988, Gabriel in 1993 and Vanessa in 2001—in a small East L.A. bungalow with just one bathroom. Ricardo signed his son up for T-ball at nearby Salazar Park when he was four. Halfway through the season, the team’s coach vanished and Ricardo took over. From that moment on, Ricardo organized the team every summer and coached his son at each level until Ricky reached high school. Ricardo—who eventually gained citizenship and found steady work as a truck driver when the U.S. eased its immigration policies—played baseball in a men’s league and regularly had 15-year-old Ricky play on his team, lying to the league and telling them the boy was 18. That experience vaulted Romero ahead of his high school peers and he quickly became one of the best players in East L.A., despite weighing just 160 lb. and having never seen the inside of a weight room. He enrolled at Garfield High because he lived in the school’s feeder area, but in Grade 11 transferred to Theodore Roosevelt High School—farther away, but with better connections to college scouts. But the two schools have a heated rivalry; the move did not go over well. So the first time Romero played against his old school, he was beaned in his first at-bat. He took his punishment and trotted down to first without saying a word. He got his revenge later in the afternoon when he threw his 14th strikeout of the game to finish what remains the only no-hitter he’s ever thrown. He struck out 162 batters in 80 innings that year. He was on another level.
Remember when Ricky Romero was drafted by the Red Sox?
It was June 2002 and Romero had a 3.8 GPA and a letter of intent to attend California State Fullerton in the fall on a full scholarship. So when Boston selected him in the 37th round of the MLB first-year player draft, Romero wasn’t even aware of it. A Red Sox official called him and said the organization was happy to have drafted him but wouldn’t be offering to sign him immediately, instead opting to follow his progress through junior college—he’s from East L.A., there’s no way he could be going anywhere better than a junior college—and perhaps considering a signing bonus after the season. “I was like, dude, I’m going to a Div. I school,” Romero says. “I don’t really think they did their homework.” Imagine what could have been: Romero making regular starts at Rogers Centre in a Boston uniform.
Instead, here’s a kid from a region of California where 97 percent of the residents are Hispanic and gang activity is prevalent, being transplanted into the considerably, let’s say, vanilla environment of Fullerton’s campus where 97 percent of the enrolment owns a Jack Johnson CD and frisbee activity is prevalent. “There was definitely a culture shock,” Romero says. “I was like whoa, where am I? Orange County?”
Life was a little foreign on the baseball field, as well, where Romero struggled to gain the trust of his coaches. He was used sparingly as a freshman reliever and was left in for just three innings when the team finally gave him a chance to start mid-season. He was given just five more starts after that—including a three-hit complete game shutout of Pacific University when he struck out 14—finishing the season with a 3.20 ERA and 46 strikeouts in 56.1 innings.
He entered his sophomore year ready for a more significant role, but one of the first things Fullerton pitching coach Dave Serrano—now the head coach at Tennessee—did in the lead-up to the season was sit his entire pitching staff down in the dugout for public performance evaluations. He went up and down the dugout, one by one, and gave candid, frank assessments on their progress, whether positive or negative. They all sat there quietly, hearing each other getting broken down. Romero can still feel his palms sweating as Serrano reached him in the line. “Ricky,” Serrano started. “So far you haven’t lived up to what we thought you were going to be. You’re going to pitch out of the bullpen until we think you’re ready. At that point, you might get a start. But you might not.” It was a crushing verdict.
But every success story hinges on a stroke of luck, and when two of Fullerton’s starters went down with injuries right before opening day, Serrano called Romero into his office. “Listen, Ricky. We have no choice—we’ve got to go with you,” Serrano said, in the world’s most backhanded vote of confidence. “This is your opportunity. I want to see your pride in the way you carry yourself. I want to see that come out of you. If you have to scream as you go out to the mound, do it. I just want to see that fire in you.” Romero took Serrano’s questioning of his mettle to heart and went 14-4 in 22 starts with a 3.37 ERA and 126 strikeouts. He was an All-American and led Fullerton to its first national title in nine years.
Romero returned for his junior year as one of the most hyped college pitchers in the nation, and watched his draft stock reach new heights with every outing. Major league scouts were regularly attending his games; executives were calling his house, wanting to talk to his parents. “Everything was so new for me—I’m sitting there like what the hell is going on?” Romero says. “I never thought I’d even go to a Div. I college. Now all of a sudden I’m being drafted in the first round.”
Romero paid attention to the draft this time, listening on his computer at his parents’ house when the Blue Jays made him the first pitcher off the board with the sixth pick, selecting him ahead of highly-touted position players Troy Tulowitzki and Jacoby Ellsbury. The team gave him a $2.4-million signing bonus and an assignment to report to Dunedin to pitch for the Blue Jays High-A affiliate. Toronto expected Romero to move through the system quickly, having already spent three years in college, but by the time he reached Double-A in 2006, something stalled. He lost grasp of his control and started giving up too many walks that turned into earned runs—sound familiar? The then 23-year-old was getting booed off the field with an ERA over 4.00 in the minors while Tulowitzki and Ellsbury were both hitting .280 in the majors. Talk of Romero being a first-round bust grew louder and louder.
Romero listened to all the critics. When Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi was quoted in Sports Illustrated saying he made the wrong choice drafting Romero, the left-hander cut it out and taped it in his locker. He spoke to his parents daily, talking his way through his confidence issues. In one conversation, he swore to his mother that one day he would make the majors and when he did, he would never return to the minor leagues. He followed through, earning a major league rotation spot in 2009 and serving as the Blue Jays’ opening day starter the next three years as he built up to an outstanding 2011 season when he won 15 games with a 2.92 ERA and was an All-Star. “I never wanted to become one of those guys that’s up and down—I wanted to get there and stick,” Romero says. “Even though I’m sure a lot of people wished I would’ve been in the minors in 2012, you know?”
This is the part of the Ricky Romero story where things go very, very wrong. The point where the tension reaches its peak. “This game, man,” Romero says, trailing off. “As soon as you’re feeling really high about it, it’ll knock you on your ass.”
Through his first 15 starts of the 2012 season, Romero was walking more batters than he would have liked—4.4 every nine innings, to be exact—but doing well to mitigate the damage. Consistently working deep into ball games, he allowed four runs or less in 14 of the starts and the Blue Jays went 11-4 in those outings. But by walking so many batters and struggling to pinpoint his control, he was tiptoeing along the edge of a cliff. It was in Boston on June 27 when he plummeted off.
He opened the game with a four-pitch walk, followed by a full-count double to deep centre and another four-pitch walk. By the end of the first inning, the Red Sox had batted around and scored six runs. Romero walked two more in the second, surrendering another run, and walked one more in the third as his pitch count climbed to 90. He didn’t come out for the fourth.
In his next outing at home against Kansas City, he got through the first inning untouched before allowing a two-run homer in the second, back-to-back run-scoring doubles in the third and a wild pitch that scored a run in the fourth. By the end of the night, he had 11 hits and eight earned runs on his line as he took his second loss in a row. The rest of the season followed a similar pattern: eight runs and six walks against Oakland, five runs and eight walks against Detroit, seven runs and eight hits against Tampa Bay. Fans started to boo. Romero started to doubt himself. It all fell apart. “I wanted to get away to an island somewhere and just forget about everything,” Romero says.
But Romero never gave up. His manager, John Farrell, skipped him in the rotation just once—shielding Romero from a Saturday afternoon start in Boston, where his troubles began. Otherwise, Romero made every scheduled start. But it was like running up a hill that got steeper and steeper every five days; and with every bad outing, Romero lost his footing and tumbled back to the bottom. Every time he tried to run up that endless hill he lost a little bit of energy and a little bit of life, grew a little more tired and a little less emotionally sound. His coaches asked him if he needed time off. Fans and analysts said he needed to be removed from the rotation. But Romero never stopped trying to run up that hill. “At the end of all this, I’m satisfied with one thing: that I never backed down,” Romero says. “A lot of guys would take days off or skip a start. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to keep going back out there.” He did. And by the end of the year, he led the AL in walks and was second in earned runs. He went three full months without a win. And every night he went home and sat restlessly in the dark obsessing about what was happening to him. It was torture.
It’s an unseasonably cold March afternoon in Florida and Romero is less than pleased about it, bundled up in a heavy black sweatshirt, track pants and sneakers, as he takes shelter in his Palm Harbor condo. It’s a semi-detached in one of those neighbourhoods where every house looks the same, tucked into the corner of a crescent lined with walls of waist-high green shrubs and billowing elm trees. The Bentley in the garage is the only indication a professional ballplayer lives here. Romero bought the home shortly after receiving his signing bonus and rents it out to members of the Dunedin Blue Jays during the regular season. He has decorated sparsely with an armless Adam Lind bobblehead and a plaque from the 2010 Jesse Litsch & Bechtel Financial Celebrity Golf Tournament displayed proudly above the fireplace. Blue Jays closer Casey Janssen owns the house next door, and pitching prospect Aaron Sanchez lives down the street.
After showing off his borderline-obsessive sneaker collection, including the Kanye West–designed Air Yeezys Nike sent him—one of just 500 pairs in existence, they typically retail for $3,000—Romero slumps into a large, grey sofa to watch Texas play Oklahoma State in the lead-up to March Madness. He rubs his left elbow, feeling over the three small marks on the inside and the larger scar on the outside—the tattoos of off-season arthroscopic surgery to clean out scar tissue and other debris that builds up in the elbows of pitchers. He’s still sore from his first outing of spring when he threw two innings and 36 pitches, facing live hitters for the first time since 2012. Romero threw almost nothing but his sinker, trying to recapture a pitch that he nearly abandoned in 2011. He thought he threw most of them OK, save for the one he hung that was promptly hit out of the ballpark. That was all it took for the speculation to resume: that Romero couldn’t locate, that he was heading for another disastrous season, that he wasn’t out of the woods. It’s why Romero doesn’t buy into one of the most commonly cited narratives about him and 2013. “People keep saying, oh he’s the fifth starter now, this is going to take the pressure off. It’s like, what pressure?” Romero says, flames igniting in his eyes. “In 2011, I had a great year—how come nobody talked about pressure then? Then last year, I expected myself to have another great year. It didn’t happen. But it had nothing to do with pressure. Everyone needs to get over it. It happened. It’s done. It’s over with. I’m not going to be the last guy to struggle.”
That’s the thing—you can’t remove humanity from sports. The men on the field are not throwing, hitting, running robots, but real people with fallible human traits and tendencies. Many of them have overcome quite a bit to get here. It sounds painfully obvious, but it seems fans sometimes forget ballplayers like Ricky Romero existed as human beings before arriving in their town. That they could have parents who took dangerous, illegal risks to better their lives; that they could come from crime-infested neighbourhoods that few people escape; that, against all conceivable odds, they could have reached the height of a profession that is extremely difficult to succeed in. And in spite of that, they are expected to perform well always, and are ridiculed when they fail.
Last year, Ricky Romero failed. He heard your boos; he heard you when you demanded he be demoted; he absorbed it all and took it much more to heart than you could have realized. Yes, he throws baseballs for a living, and yes, he makes a lot of money. But he is human. Everyone must struggle. And no one takes it as hard as Ricky Romero. Believe that. So, on the fifth day of this Blue Jays season, he’ll hope to climb onto the mound at Rogers Centre against the same Red Sox who began his downward spiral last year and be better. He’s going to try to turn things around.
He’s going to try to let it go.
Arden Zwelling is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine
