SKY OF BLUE
Romo remains optimistic despite bumpy homecoming
Sergio Romo lay in the corner of an L-shaped black leather couch in the Dodgers clubhouse three hours before the game’s first pitch.
Clubhouse attendants watched and Dodgers President Andrew Friedman occasionally glanced over as Romo scrolled through more than 100 video games on a console connected to a television.
“Look!” he hollered to no one in particular. On the screen, “RBI Baseball” from the original Nintendo system was loading.
A minute later, Romo beamed and giggled as his team hit a home run and the pixelated crowd cheered, a 34-year-old kid playing a version of the game he loves.
If only pitching for the Dodgers came that easily.
Through 192⁄3 innings this season, Romo’s earned-run average has soared to a career-high 6.41. The month of April was particularly cruel, Romo giving up five runs in one-third of an inning at Arizona and five days later yielding two in one-third of an inning at San Francisco.
At one point, he had given up an average of more than one earned run per inning and Dodgers fans might have wondered if his one-year, $3-million deal with the club was a year too long.
“Statistically,” the veteran right-hander conceded, “it doesn’t look that great right now.”
Romo grew up in Brawley, a desert community 31⁄2 hours southeast of Los Angeles and 20 minutes north of the Mexican border, and he antic-
ipated a happy homecoming after nine years with the San Francisco Giants.
He turned down more lucrative offers from other teams so that he could play closer to his parents, siblings and three sons, and so that he could fulfill a dream that began when he was a child listening to Vin Scully call games on the radio.
It’s been a bumpy start, but Romo’s goals are still in front of him: a 10-year bigleague career culminating in a fourth World Series ring.
“Just give me the baseball and I look at every game as an opportunity to pitch, not compete against my numbers,” Romo said. “I’m still competing against the other team.”
Family members call the home where Romo grew up “The Fort.” That’s because it’s now surrounded by a tall wooden fence, installed after a Giants World Series championship to dissuade curious onlookers.
It was in the backyard that Sergio and younger brother Andrew honed their baseball skills under the supervision of their father, Frank, himself a player in Mexican amateur leagues. There are remnants from those workouts, which would take place after Frank arrived home from working as a mechanic in the agricultural fields.
Where Sergio’s mother, Leticia Romo, wanted a f lower garden there is a lump of dirt with a chunk of battered wood stuck in the middle — the pitching mound and rubber. About 60 feet away, where Leticia wanted trees, is home plate. A hole in an old tire dangling from a pole forms what was the strike zone. And in another corner of the yard, a string with fragments of a battered baseball clinging to the end hangs from a pole. Hit properly, Andrew explained, the ball and string would loop perfectly all the way around the pole.
“That is just what we would do all the time, if we weren’t playing video games,” said Andrew, who played five seasons in the minor leagues before becoming a Yuma County sheriff ’s deputy in Arizona.
“It was like training camp back there,” Leticia recalled.
“It was hardcore,” remembered the boys’ older sister, Leti, laughing. “They broke my window!”
While Sergio and Andrew were busy with baseball, riding bikes and playing video games, Leti always had a book or a baseball scorecard in her hands.
“Back when they were little, Frank would always put them in sports,” Leticia said. “And I was always there for them.”
The attention helped steer the Romo children away from other more sinister influences that pervaded a community where the median annual income is just over $37,000 and summer temperatures routinely top 105 degrees.
Three of Sergio’s closest childhood friends died because of drug use. Another is serving time in prison. Yet another made a career out of the Navy, a path Sergio almost chose when he had no scholarship offers out of high school.
“I was this close away from signing,” Sergio said, pinching his fingers together. “But I just looked at my dad and said, ‘Dad, remember that promise I made you?’ And I was like, ‘I think I can do it.’”
Romo wasn’t tall — he’s listed at 5 feet 11 — and was slightly built. But his coach at Brawley High, Pedro Carranza, believed in him and called around on his behalf. What came next was a baseball odyssey — stops at two junior colleges and two universities, followed by a phone call late in the 2005 draft.
“Everyone always criticized him for his size,” Andrew said, or that he “didn’t throw hard enough. But watching him play … [I] just loved that fire that he had.
“And he still has it.”
Romo was the 852nd player chosen in 2005, his selection prompting a phone call to his grandfather.
Evaristo Romo was a lifelong Dodgers fan who made his way to Brawley from Mexico and always had a ballgame on the television or radio. “He told me he was proud of me, that I got a foot in the door,” Sergio said.
But moments after they hung up, Evaristo called back. His grandson hadn’t told him who’d drafted him.
“Anybody but the Giants!” Evaristo said.
As it turned out, the Dodgers’ archrival was a good fit . Within three years, Romo was promoted to the majors.
The call-up surprised almost everyone in Brawley — except for Romo’s family.
“Nobody else believed it because, yeah, he was a little troublemaker at times and the whole, ‘You’re too small and you don’t throw hard enough,’ ” Andrew said. “But he pushed through it. The more things you told him he couldn’t do, the more he wanted it and the more he did it.”
Romo won three World Series rings with the Giants, throwing the final strike in Game 4 of the 2012 Series — a fastball when everyone expected a slider.
Afterward, Evaristo was spotted in Brawley walking to church in 100-degree heat wearing a Giants jacket.
Before Evaristo died last summer, he requested that he be buried in his grandson’s World Series jersey and a Giants cap. “It was just an example of how proud he was,” Romo said.
Romo became a free agent after last season, hoping to stay with the Giants.
“It’s been one heck of a ride and I’ve been very appreciative of the whole thing,” he said. “Twentynine teams didn’t draft me, but the Giants did. Growing up a Dodgers fan … it wasn’t necessarily a hard pill to swallow, but I was kind of like, ‘Wow, the sheer irony of life.’ ”
Now, toward the end of his career, the tables have been turned again.
From Eddie West Field at the high school to Johnny’s Burritos, a local favorite Mexican restaurant, all of Brawley buzzed with the news that Romo would sign with the Dodgers.
“You should have seen the number of texts I received,” said Carranza, his high school coach.
Romo called his father first, Carranza shortly thereafter. Leticia went for a fresh manicure, making sure her long nails were painted a Dodgers hue of blue.
“I was a ball of tears,” she recalled, crying again at the memory.
Leticia cries a lot when recounting family memories and Sergio’s accomplishments. Tears of laughter about Sergio’s progressing from driving the family “Mazda-rati” to his own McLaren are followed by tears of sadness when she recalls his leaving home.
Now, watching him play at Dodger Stadium, she said, “I can’t help the feelings watching him there and I can’t believe that’s my son.”
With Romo’s return to the area, Leti began to make plans for him to repay old favors. She oversees the Cross-Cultural Center at Chapman University and it was Uncle Sergio’s turn to provide free babysitting for his niece and nephew.
After all, it was Leti who often provided food for Romo when he was a starving college student. She said he would call her when he was at Colorado Mesa University and she was living in Florida. Before long, a pizza would be delivered to his door, compliments of his compassionate sister.
Romo never doubted that his family would be happy when he signed with the Dodgers, especially since it meant the ban on wearing blue would be lifted. “I joked around with all of them,” he said, “telling them they could take the Dodgers stuff out of the closet now.”
Said Andrew: “Blue fits him so much better. He looks so good in a blue uniform!”
Romo is happy to be a Dodger and, moreover, “thankful that I have a spot in the big leagues, that I am able to keep counting the days. I am thankful for having this opportunity here,” he added, “because not only do I have a spot at the table on a team, but I have a spot at a really, really good table.
“I just want to win.”