In mid-March, Arden Zwelling sat down with Ricky Romero at his condo just outside Dunedin for a candid and wide-ranging conversation covering, among other topics, his nightmarish 2012. This is an edited transcript. For the full story, pick-up the Sportsnet magazine’s Blue Jays season preview.
TRUST ME, it sucks to get your ass kicked when you’re out there. It sucks to get booed by the people who were cheering you on like crazy a year ago. But I have nothing but love for the city of Toronto. They expect winners and I expect to be a winner every time I take the ball. I would be booing myself, too. That’s just the way fans are sometimes, in all sports. I’ve been to Lakers games where Dwight Howard is shooting a free throw and if he misses, the whole crowd is like, “Ohhhh.” Well, let’s see you go up there.
I UNDERSTAND WE get paid a lot of money to practise and do what we gotta do. But sometimes there are only certain things you can control in a game. Once that ball leaves my hand, I have no control over where it’s going to get hit. I can make a perfect pitch and it’ll get hit out of the ballpark. I can throw a terrible pitch, I can hang a curveball, and the guy can swing and miss. That’s one of the things that over the past year I’ve learned. It’s not like just because you had one good year you’re going to have another one the next year. Hitters adjust to you, the league adjusts to you, so you’ve gotta learn how to adjust to them.
I LOST TRACK of 60 feet, six inches. I was trying to do too much. To the point where it messes with your head. You think it’s your mechanics, you think it’s your arm angle, you think it’s where your leg is landing. In the end I was just like, “Ricky, it’s 60 feet, six inches. You still have to execute the pitch. You’re forgetting about the most important part. Just hitting the target every time.”
I’M A COMPETITOR—I’ve always been. So it hits me hard when I have bad games. It usually takes me a couple nights to get over it. And then you realize, “OK, once I take this uniform off, it’s done, it’s over with.” I’m gonna come in with the mentality of getting better next start. That’s the way I approached it.
