Results tagged ‘ Sergio Romo ’

An Unlikely Star

I notice the hand-written note sticking out from the nameplate at the top of  Sergio Romo’s locker.  On the front is a child’s drawing of a man: a round head, oval body and four straight lines for arms and legs. The body is colored orange with a big “G” stretching from the player’s chin to the start of his stick legs.
Across the top is scrawled “Thank You.”
Romo pulls it down and shows it to me. 
“This is one of the perks of the job,” he says. 
He had been asked to meet with a boy who was a big Giants’ fan and a cancer patient. The boy was in the hall outside the clubhouse. All Romo did was go out and chat with him and his family sign a few things. And for that he received this painstakingly written note. 
“It’s amazing that we get the chance to do this,” Romo said. “And that it means something to someone else. I’m sure it meant more to me than him.”
Romo is one of those guys who look like the friend of the baseball player, not the player himself. He’s a few inches short of six feet. He’s slight. He doesn’t have the big leaguer’s too cool-for-school demeanor. He loooooves to talk. He has been known to bounce around the clubhouse and dugout like a four-year-old at Chuck E. Cheese. (Put him and Lincecum together and you have enough energy to light the scoreboard.)
In his second year in the major leagues, Romo still finds himself looking around and shaking his head that he has made it this far. Not that he lacks for confidence. He is fearless and ravenous on the mound: Going into Tuesday’s game, he has appeared in more games than any other Giants reliever. Opponents are batting .186 against him. In 9 of his 11 games, he held opponents scoreless, and he leads relievers with 13 strikeouts.
“I was at a pizza place the other night after a game and guy comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Sergio Romo?’ I had on a jacket with the hood up and the guy recognized me! It’s crazy.”
Romo grew up in Brawley, California, on the Mexican border, among the fields of sugar beets. lettuce and alfalfa. His father, Frank, was born in Mexico and crossed the border into the U.S. with his migrant-farmer parents when he was a baby. Frank grew up moving with the crops, from Imperial Valley to Salinas to Stockton, building his muscles lifting boxes of lettuce. Wherever he went, he found a field to play baseball. When his first son, Sergio, was two years old, he bought him a baseball glove. 
“He grew up with a glove on his hand,” Frank says when I call him in Brawley.
Even as a toddler, he went with his father when Frank played for a semi-pro team in Mexicali. Sergio began pitching at age 8 and never stopped, though he wasn’t recruited out of high school. He was just 5 feet seven. After bouncing around four colleges in four years, he was drafted by the Giants in 2005 in the 28th round. 
He was in the major leagues three years later, making his debut in June 2008.
He nearly doomed himself before he had barely begun, however, missing curfew, going AWOL, rubbing veterans and coaches the wrong way with his happy-go-lucky attitude coupled with fits of pique when he felt wronged. His transition into the maturing, more self-aware player who showed up this spring is a tale in itself.
And I’ll tell it in an upcoming issue of Giants Magazine. Stay tuned.
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The Clubbies Speak

So I showed up in the clubhouse this morning after being away for almost a month. I stopped in the players’ dining room to get my morning cup of coffee. Three of the “clubbies” – the men who take care of the players’ uniforms, food, equipment, everything — were cleaning up from breakfast.
I asked how spring camp was going so far. 
“Best in a long time,” one said. All three clubbies had been around for many years.
“This team,” he said, “something special about them.”
“Don’t you think that every spring?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen this since 2002,” he said.
All three talked about a sense of maturity and confidence they saw in clubhouse. The young guys who came up together in the minor-leagues – Lincecum, Cain, Romo, Sandoval, etc. – had now had time to mesh as big-leaguers. And among the biggest stars, there was no jockeying for power, no ego-driven attempts to establish their importance. 
“Do you know which player has been with the Giants longest?” one clubbie asked me.
I thought about it. No Randy Winn. No Rich Aurilia. Barry Zito?
“Matt Cain,” he said. “Four-and-a-half years.”
I wondered what that meant for a club — to have an entire roster of guys who were fairly new to the team. In the clubhouse, Aubrey Huff was sitting in front of his locker after workouts, reading a magazine. Did he, as a veteran player new to the Giants this spring, think the relative newness of the players have an impact on team chemistry?
“I think so,” he said. “I’ve been on teams where you walk into a clubhouse and it just doesn’t feel right. I walked in here and everyone’s ragging on each other. Everybody here seems to dish it out. And everybody takes it.”
In other words, everyone seems on pretty much equal footing. 
“You look at a guy like Lincecum,” Huff said. “He doesn’t have that ‘I’m in the paper everyday’ attitude. There are a lot of guys who are self-promoters, but he hasn’t let anything go to his head. So that sets a tone right there.
“I’m a big believer in chemistry. Sure, you can spend $300 million and probably win. But for most teams, chemistry is one of the things you have to have in order to win.”
That’s the buzz from here. Yes, it’s spring. All this optimism might be nothing more than a byproduct of 82-degree weather and a 14-6 record. 
But when the clubbies are waxing poetic, you can’t help but wonder.

Day One

Day One : Those were the words at the top of today’s workout schedule, posted on the bulletin board outside the Giants’ clubhouse.
Today was the first day that the full team worked out together. There was a closed-door team meeting at 10:30 this morning. It had been scheduled to start at 10, with workouts beginning at 10:30. But the field was covered with frost, so everything was pushed back to allow the sun time to warm up the grass. 
A few notes from the clubhouse:
  • Jeremy Affeldt will be starting a video blog called The Set-Up on the Giants’ website. He’s one of the funniest guys in baseball. Check out his video on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area from earlier this week. You’ll get a taste for what his vlog will be like when it starts sometime next month.
  • Affeldt is a big believer in chemistry on a team. He says chemistry was the key to Colorado reaching the World Series when he played there in 2007 “This team is as close to Colorado as I’ve been on. We have a lot of fun together. Lots of inside jokes.” He said it helps the team’s chemistry when the main star of the team, Tim Lincecum, is a good guy. “It’s like Matt Holliday in Colorado. He was a good family man. Really humble. You always see Lincecum signing autographs. He has so much fun when he plays. Timmy brings that dynamic. He reminds you that the game is supposed to be fun.” 
  • Thomas Neal, the 22-year-old minor-leaguer, is here in his first major-league camp. But he is very familiar to manager Bruce Bochy. Neal played with Bochy’s son on a traveling team in Poway, in Southern California. The two young men are still good friends, and Neal has spent many an afternoon and evening at the Bochy home.  ”(Bochy’s wife) and my mom are pretty good friends,” Neal says. 
  • Neal has another major-league connection: He went to his high school prom with Tony Gwynn’s daughter. 
  • On a day-to-day basis, no one – other than perhaps Pablo Sandoval – is happier in the clubhouse than reliever Sergio Romo. He couldn’t wait to get to camp and back on the field. “I have such an appreciation of where I’m at,” he said. “I do enjoy what I do.” He said he feels invincible when he stares in at a batter. When I’m out on the mound, it’s the only place I’m not 5 feet 10.”

The Giants – Back Together Again

Outside in the light drizzle, before they went on stage, the Giants players threw their arms around each other like brothers at a reunion. Many hadn’t seen each other since the 2009 season ended in October. Now they were together on Thursday night at the Delancey Street Theater in San Francisco for the first-ever “town hall meeting” for about 400 season-ticket holders who had won the chance to attend. 
The guys caught up on each other’s news. Alex Hinshaw and Matt Cain married their longtime sweethearts. John Bowker got a “puggle,” half pug and half beagle, named Scout. Brian Wilson went to Australia with Brad Penny. Brandon Medders had Halloween and New Year’s Eve gigs with his band in Tuscaloosa. Alabama. Manny Burriss, rehabbing from his foot injury, spent time going to hockey and basketball games with his five-year-old son, Jamari. Kevin Frandsen, after playing winter ball, served as a groomsman at Hinshaw’s December wedding in Oregon.
Inside the theater, when the players had filed in and filled the first two rows of seats, Mike Krukow got everyone standing – fans and players alike – for a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
“Nice goin’!” he said after the final note. “It’s officially baseball season!”
Krukow and Duane Kuiper hosted the event, calling the players up to the stage in small groups by position. It was a rare opportunity to see and hear the players off the field and thus get a sense of who they are as men. General manager Brian Sabean watched from the back of the theater, among the standing-room-only crowd. He had planned to stay for just a few minutes. But, as he told his players at a team meeting the following morning at AT&T Park, the event “was so compelling I stayed for the whole thing.”
“I was very impressed with last night,” he told them. “In listening to everything you had to say, three themes emerged: You are humble. You are respectful. And you have passion. This team is in a great frame of mind going into the season.”
The two-hour event will air on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area on Feb. 16 at  6:30 p.m. Here are some snippets:
? Jeremy Affeldt emerged, as he always does in these things, as a natural entertainer. He got everyone laughing with pointed barbs at manager Bruce Bochy for making him pitch to a guy “who hit about .900” off him. When, a few minutes later, Kuiper asked the relievers to name their all-time favorite player,  Affeldt deadpanned, “Bruce Bochy.” (The next morning at the team meeting, Bochy said he was ready to name his Opening Day pitcher: Jeremy Affeldt.)
? Asked what position he would play if he got to choose, Pablo Sandoval didn’t hesitate. “Hitting!”
? Sergio Romo showed off the T-shirt he had bought earlier in the day. It was pure Sergio who, besides Pablo, is the most playful guy on the team. The design on the front of the shirt lit up whenever he talked, which meant – as his teammates will tell you – it blazed all night.
? Dan Runzler, who played at every minor-league level last year before making it to San Francisco in September, was asked what it was like to pitch to players he had only seen on TV. “I was in more shock going into the locker room (of the Giants),” he said. “I had never been to a major-league spring training, so I was completely star-struck.” 
? When the pitchers were asked when they knew they wanted to be pitchers, Runzler said,  ”I knew I wanted to be a pitcher when they took the bat out of my hands and told me to pitch.”
? New second baseman Mark DeRosa made an impression with his down-to-earth style. “To me,” he said, “it’s all about trying to win championships. When you have a starting rotation like we have, and a bullpen and closer like we have, we’ve got a great chance.”
? Tim Lincecum, the one player to prompt a standing ovation, was asked what he could do to top his accomplishment of winning two Cy Young Awards in two years: “Hit a home run for the first time in my life.”
? Barry Zito was asked what musician he’d like to jam with. Because he’s been into drums lately, he said, he would choose drummer Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews Band.
See you tomorrow at FanFest!
Shots from the Town Hall Meeting:
Brandon Medders and Tim Lincecum
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Players calling lucky Season Ticketholders today from the front office at AT&T Park:
Jeremy Affledt:
 

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Mark DeRosa:

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Buster Posey:
 

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Sergio Romo:

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Eli Whiteside:

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Brandon Medders:

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From the Horses’ Mouths

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It sure looks weird to see the clubhouse in the off-season. Even filled as it was last night with fans in folding chairs, it was like walking into an abandoned building. There’s a kind of ghostly loneliness about it without players slapping domino tiles on table tops and answering fan mail in front of their lockers and yanking down the bills of their caps as they rush out to take early BP. Is April really still three-and-a-half months away?

The next best thing to the actual baseball season, though, is talking about it.

Up on a temporary stage, erected on the far right of the room near the starting pitchers’ lockers, Giants manager Bruce Bochy was sitting next to general manager Brian Sabean and taking questions from moderator Greg Papa.

“He’s the best all-around player that I’ve ever seen because he can play everywhere,” Bochy was saying. “He has a very similar body type to Tony Gwynn.”

He was talking about Pablo Sandoval, who embarked on a rigorous conditioning and weight-loss program during the off-season, a one-man camp the Giants dubbed “Operation Panda.”

“Obviously,” Sabean cracked, nodding at Bochy and himself, “we haven’t been in the same camp.”

Packed into the room, in rows of chairs bordered by four walls of lockers, were season-ticket holders who had been invited to talk baseball with Bochy, Sabean, managing general partner Bill Neukom and relief pitcher Sergio Romo.

Asked by Papa if two-time Cy Young winner Tim Lincecum’s stuff matches up with the all-time greats, Bochy didn’t hesitate.

“Sure it does. He’s by far the best pitcher I’ve ever seen. When you have four pitches, especially the best or close to the best changeup in baseball right now, he’s up there among the greats. He’s a thinker out there and knows what the opposing team is doing and that’s why he’s won two Cy Young Awards.”

“What’s interesting about him,” Sabean said, “is in college he would throw 140 pitches on a Friday night and then be the closer for his team on Sunday. He’s proved to have a rubber arm and has an inner strength that other people don’t have. He’s fearless and he thinks that on any given day that he’s better than anyone else.”

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was Sergio Romo. He’s a player that fans don’t know very well yet, and last night they got a glimpse of his sense of humor and his boyish excitement for the game – starting with the fact he was texting his mother as he climbed onto the stage to tell he was going to be on television.

“You’re from Brawley, California, near Los Angeles,” Papa said, “so who was your favorite team growing up?”

“No comment,” Romo said, smiling. “Let’s just say I started hating the Dodgers the second I put on a Giants uniform.”

After struggling with injuries last season, he said he’s “very excited for the season to start . . . I miss my number 54 on my back.”

When Papa opened the discussion to questions, one of the first was an update on the Giants’ up and coming players.

“Peguero is a young outfielder that we just placed on our 40-man roster,” Sabean said. “He’s a lot like Sandoval in that he has a lot of energy. Thomas Neal came into his own last year and developed an all-around game. Brandon Crawford is going to be our shortstop of the future. We have a flow of talent that people will be proud of.”

As for the readiness of pitcher Madison Bumgarner and catcher Buster Posey, Bochy said, “I really think that they can start for us next year. Posey is gonna be a front line catcher and he’s on the fast track. Bumgarner did a heck of a job last year when Timmy went down. Here are two tremendous kids that stood out and both held their own. I’m curious to see how Buster looks this spring.”

One fan wanted to know about keeping Lincecum and fellow pitcher Matt Cain as Giants for the long haul.

“Cain has two more years before free agency,” Sabean said, “and Lincecum has four more and is going through arbitration right now. We are in a good situation because they both want to be Giants for a long time.”

Sabean also addressed the decision not to resign veteran pitcher Brad Penny.

“We had a short window and in our estimation we thought we had home court in our situation. We couldn’t bring ourselves to overpay when we have Madison Bumgarner in the wings.”

Still want more? Tune in to a full broadcast of the event on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area on January 15 at 6:30 p.m.

Some shots from the taping:

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A Night in San Jose

I did a double take when I saw pitcher Sergio Romo with his teammates at the Giants fan event at the Britannia Arms restaurant in downtown San Jose last night.

Romo’s round baby face was lean and angular. Last season he almost could have passed for a guy who played on the company softball team. Now he looks ready for the San Francisco marathon.

I told him he looked great and asked how much weight he lost.

“Last time I checked, about 12 pounds,” he said. “People here (with the Giants) are taking me seriously, so I’ve got to take it seriously, too.”

He played fall ball in Mexicali, Mexico, then attended the Giants’ three-week conditioning camp in Scottsdale. He continued training at home in Yuma, forgoing a vacation.

“(The trainers) took the time to teach me what I should be doing, and I saw what a difference it made,” Romo said.

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Here is the first thing I heard when the team arrived at the Brit Arms into a crowd of fans:

“That little kid? He looks like the kid that rides the bus to the mall in Santa Cruz!”

The incredulous woman’s companion had just pointed out the 2008 Cy Young Award winner.

 

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Rookie RH pitcher Joe Martinez — signing autographs at a table between Steve Holm and Kevin Frandsen — went straight from the instructional league in November to Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J.

Since he was signed by the Giants out of Boston College in 2005, Martinez has earned a few bucks every off-season by working at a substitute teacher.

“He teaches whatever class they need him to teach – gym, Spanish,” said his girlfriend, Lindsay Harrington. The two met while students at BC. Harrington works at a public relations firm in Boston.

Alex Hinshaw’s fiancé, Courtney, is much more comfortable going into this season than she was last year when Hinshaw was a rookie.

“I was a little intimidated and a little worried about what we were going to find when Alex was called up to San Francisco. But there are so many good guys here. I can’t imagine there’s any other team like this. We feel really lucky.

“Brian Wilson and Barry Zito have been amazing,” she said. “And Jack Taschner. I commend them on how they’ve helped him grow. They gave him a taste of the nightlife and a taste of responsibility. A little bit of everything.”

She and Hinshaw met at San Diego State. Courtney was a basketball player and would have liked to become a high school coach.

“But this has always been his dream,” she said. “So I’m putting that first. He’s had such a tough time getting here, so I want to help him see this through. I get so much joy from seeing him so happy.”

The two plan to get married in November in Oregon, where Courtney’s parents live.

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Look for another post later today from the players’ meetings with new managing general partner Bill Neukom, media interviews and lunch with the Giants office staff.

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Lincecum at Britannia Arms:

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