Each of the past few offseasons, it seems as though that once the bigger named free agents have signed up, the front office has started reaching around in the couch cushions in Citizens Bank Park and found a few extra million to spend on the roster. Instead of using it on a hitter for the bench or adding more depth to protect against possible injury in the rotation, they’ve invested it by waving that extra few million at the veteran free agent reliever and seeing who was going to bite.

In 2022, that was Corey Knebel.

In 2023, it was Craig Kimbrel.

In 2024, you could stretch and say it was Spencer Turnbull, but I’d disagree with you.

This offseason, the target was clear. Jordan Romano was coming off an elbow injury that shortened his own 2024 season and led to the Blue Jays nontendering him. The Phillies pounced, handed him $8.5 million for this season and hoped he would rebound well enough to help fill the void that was created with Jeff Hoffman and Carlos Estevez going elsewhere.

The early returns are not encouraging.

It made sense to target someone like Romano this offseason and think that he could have made a good buy low bargain in the bullpen. The team had to have pored over physicals when evaluating him and come away feeling comfortable enough that he didn’t need surgery to correct whatever was ailing him last year. Whatever giddyup was lost on his fastball and whatever break was lessened on his slider, well that would be recovered given the rest he had last year.

That’s who he was north of the border. When Romano was in Toronto, he was known as having a blazing fastball to help set up a devastating slider. Seeing that fastball average upwards of 97 miles per hour a few seasons back, the team was hoping that some rest for that elbow injury last year would help him rediscover a few ticks. So far…

In this day and age of fastball regularly tickling the 100 mark with alarming regularity, one cannot be called a high leverage reliever and throw a fastball that is that low. It’s not even that his velocity is down that much that is a concern. He’s also been unable to harness that pitch enough to put it into good spots.

And as we know, once you are unable to locate a fastball, it helps the opposing hitter eliminate a pitch almost altogether, allowing them to sit on what was your bread and butter: the slider.

The early going is that neither pitch is very good. The small sample size applies, but he’s got a slugging percentage against on both pitches over .600. To put it into analytical terms, that’s not good.

It’s not as though the concern is lying only amongst the fanbase either. Even the manager seems concerned that there is an issue with Romano.

“It’s something we’ve got to check into,” Thomson said. “Everything out of the trainer’s room, there’s no red flags. It concerns me a little bit.”

One can’t help but be at least a bit speculative about there being an injury when a pitcher loses as much velocity as Romano has. You could also draw some similarities to Taijuan Walker last season where he also saw an alarming drop in velocity with this arsenal. The team seemed to remedy that by having him work on a program all offseason long, but the team is not in a position to have such a luxury with Romano now that the season has started.

If it is not an injury, then this is a problem. If they’re going to continue to deploy Romano is high leverage spots, then the decision making of the coaching staff needs to be called into question. It’s one thing to try and let a guy work himself out of troubles, but doing so with the game(s) theoretically on the line isn’t exactly how one should be going about it. Thomson alluded to the fact that maybe some lower leverage spots to figure things might be in his future, which would be helpful. There would need to be others stepping up for those spots, but eventually, the team would probably like to put Romano back into those high leverage spots.

For now, there is an issue. The team (and Romano) needs to figure it out.