Yet in his most emblematic moment, with the Tigers down to their final strike, Romo triumphed by putting a fastball on a tee. Again and again, he made the best and most discerning hitters in the world look as inept as Charlie Brown. It was also a football, and he made a career out of being Lucy. He got there, and stayed there for 15 seasons, because he could spin a sweeping slider out of his slender hand in a way that nobody else could. He beat the odds even to set foot in the major leagues. Romo was an undersized 28th-rounder from a place in the Imperial Valley where they grow lettuce, not baseball players. He is scheduled to emerge from a reconfigured bullpen that didn’t exist the last time he jogged out as a Giant in 2016, warm up one more time to the happy bounce of “El Mechón,” face a hitter or three in the Giants’ final game on the exhibition schedule, and bring an emotional end to one of the most accomplished and astonishing careers in franchise history. The full arc of Romo’s 15-year career will come to a blissful end today at the Giants’ waterfront ballpark and upon a mound where he has appeared more times than any other pitcher. Sergio Romo throws slider after slider to Miguel Cabrera, limping around on the mound, freezes him for strike three with a fastball. On ESPN just now one of my favorite single pitches of all time. “I put slider down he shook,” Posey said. Posey wishes he had a better backstory about it to tell at parties. Romo’s clinching fastball might be the most important pitch Posey caught in his career. If Romo’s two-seamer doesn’t totally mesmerize Miguel Cabrera, if Buster Posey doesn’t watch it into his glove and then leap out of his crouch in celebration, if the remnants of Superstorm Sandy blow through and bring a two-day halt to an unresolved World Series, and if the Tigers push on with Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer waiting in the wings to pitch again, who knows what might have happened? And in the 10th inning of that game in Detroit, with the night air already thickening and an Atlantic superstorm about to descend, the Giants squeaked out a sweep in a 2012 World Series that was far closer than it appeared. It was a Trojan horse to a Triple Crown winner.
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