The Definitive Five: Who is Antonio Senzatela really?

Who is Antonio Senzatela?

The easy answer is that he is a 25-year-old right-handed pitcher expected to serve as the Colorado Rockies fourth man in the starting rotation in 2020. He has thrown 349.2 innings at the MLB level across three seasons and posted a record of 27-22, and an ERA of 5.33.

He has struggled throughout his career to induce the big swing-and-miss stuff, sitting with a K/9 rate of just 6.36 despite his excellent fastball.

His calling card has been an ironic form of steadiness. He was thrust into a starting role at just 22 years old, skipping over Triple-A entirely, as the Rockies desperately needed him to pick up vital early-season innings in 2017.

Since starting out that year by becoming the fastest pitcher in MLB to reach 10 wins, he has gone through the proverbial rollercoaster of hitting physical and mental walls, being pushed and pulled back and forth between the bullpen and rotation and between the bigs and the minors.

Through it all, he emerged with his manager’s confidence to take the ball in Game 2 of the 2018 NLDS (at 23-years-old) and showed well for himself, giving up just a pair of runs over five innings because Christian Yelich was able to muscle out a decent pitch.

He managed to do all this with one above average pitch.

Then, in 2019, that caught up with him. His 6.71 ERA was more than two runs higher than what he had accomplished in the two seasons prior and his propensity to let individual games and innings spiral away from him led to more doubts about whether or not he could put it together.

But this who Antonio Senzatela was. What’s far more important is who he is now.

By the end of the season, with the injury bug hitting every other pitcher and the Rockies firmly out of it, Senzatela finally had a chance to just be a regular starter who could also experiment a bit. And he did.

He changed the grip on both his slider and curveball. He altered his mechanics to take out a backward lean in his motion that would throw his front foot off balance, making it difficult to repeat his delivery.

And then the biggest, or most obviously notable, change came during the offseason.

It’s cliched and overdone to write during exhibition season about how any given baseball player is in the best shape of his life. But it is also sometimes just true.

It has also always been the case that Senzatela could stand to get into better playing shape and now he absolutely has. He joked a bit with us during Spring Training 1.0 that it’s been tough to lay off the candy and some of his wife’s best cooking, but he looks and feels like a whole new person right as he is entering his physical prime.

And the results are obvious.

All the caveats about spring (and now summer) camp still apply when noticing that he is getting far more swings and misses and strikeouts and allowing a lot fewer base runners. But looking beyond the results, we see a pitcher sitting on 96 MPH with his fastball and locating it at a much better rate. The slider and curve don’t in any way resemble what he threw in the past. The change still appears to be a work in progress.

This is what makes Senzatela so pivotal in this 60-game season. We’ve basically seen his floor for three years. At worst, he is a solid innings eater who will keep you in 60 percent of the games he pitches.

At best?

Senzatela is an accomplished MLB pitcher before even fully developing. He’s been playing with training wheels on and was still good enough to get the call in the postseason. He is now in his prime both physically and mentally and he has developed more in one offseason than almost any Rockie in recent memory.

If he takes that step forward that all the evidence suggests he is about to, he will join German Marquez, Jon Gray, and Kyle Freeland in giving the Rockies a truly fearsome foursome.

If that happens, these Rockies can accomplish anything. He is the piece they’ve needed not just for the last couple of years but nearly every year of their existence; a fourth rotation guy who should be solid, but has the potential to be so much more.

There may be no player on this roster who the national baseball audience is less expecting to shock the world than Antonio Senzatela. His numbers have been pedestrian and his role has been fluid.

But that’s who he was. It’s time to find out who he is.