When I announced my intention to write about Antonio Senzatela, Jon Becker popped into my Slack DMs like the Kool-Aid Man to demand that I use a title based on Penn and Teller. Credit where it’s due: It was a great idea.
You know what’s not traditionally a good idea? Writing about Antonio Senzatela.
The rigorous study of baseball empirics has made us all wiser and better, but there are a few things I remember about the old days. Chief among them is Nichols’ Law of Catcher Defense, an old pre-sabermetrics axiom that states the following: A catcher’s defensive reputation is inversely related to his offensive abilities.
Now that we can empirically test the catcher’s defense, we can prove that Austin Hedges or Patrick Bailey, or [Insert Guardians Backstop here] in fact, he is a good defender, rather than throwing up our hands and thinking that there must be a reason for them to continue to get work.
There is a related error about initializing jars, which, while true, has not been officially addressed as far as I know. (As an aside, my No. 1 career goal is to end up on the biggest Wikipedia page: List of anonymous laws. If someone wanted to formalize Baumann’s Corollary to Nichols’ Law and post it there, that would be great.)
Back to square one: A starting pitcher’s strikeout rate is negatively related to his respected ability to generate soft contact. Of course, if he doesn’t beat his opponents, he must be talented something.
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You know how I know that’s not true? Antonio Senzatela.
If you wanted to choose a photo of the time of the current state of the Rockies in the wilderness, Senzatela would be a good choice. A reliable kid eating up innings on Colorado’s last-place teams in 2017 and 2018, Senzatela lasted a decade in the big leagues with a 14.9% strikeout rate. Among pitchers currently on active rosters, with at least 200 career innings, that’s the second-lowest strikeout rate. He also has the team’s highest opponent batting average: .290.
Senzatela has the eighth-highest ERA since 2010 among pitchers with at least 500 innings, although eight of the top nine names on that list are Rockies, so it’s probably unfair to rule him out. He has his good qualities – decent fastball speed, low fastball rate, relatively low walk rate – but this is a pitcher born to be sacrificed to the God of the Innings and forgotten when the umpires hit. Instead, the Rockies gave him a five-year contract.
That contract turned out to be a nightmare, even by Colorado standards. Senzatela staved off several injuries to post a 5.07 ERA in 19 starts in the first year of the deal. Then he tore his ACL. He came back from a torn ACL in early 2023, made two appearances, blew out his elbow, and sat out most of 2023 and 2024 as he recovered from Tommy John surgery.
In 2025, finally healthy (more or less), Senzatela went 4-15 with a 6.65 ERA, 6.97 ERA, and 5.48 FIP. He struck out 11.8% of his opponents, which was the worst of the 298 pitchers who threw at least 20 innings last year. Opponents hit — and I’m sorry, there’s no polite way to say this — .341 against him over 130 innings.
Even the Rockies couldn’t put up with this, so starting in 2026, Senzatela is a relief pitcher. And for the first time in the length of his extension, he is finally doing well.
Over 33 innings and 16 relief appearances, he has a 1.36 ERA. I know! I couldn’t believe it either!
If you take “believe” to mean “you think Senzatela will continue to put up Prime Dennis Eckersley’s numbers,” there is reason to be skeptical. Senzatela is sporting a .198 BABIP, an 87.8% average, and a 5.4% HR/FB rate, which is just over a third of what it usually is. All of those are big, glaring indicators of regression.
But where should we expect Senzatela to retreat? However, his FIP is 3.19 and his xERA is 3.09. Not only are those numbers really good for a multi-inning reliever, a complete shortstop, they’re also almost half of what he was running last year. That is a huge improvement. He is like a new pitcher.
So what’s different?
The Rockies have done some crazy things with bullpen roles this season (Chase Dollander’s pre-injury season as a great reliever in the world comes to mind), and they designed the same way with Senzatela. He has faced at least four batters in all 16 of his appearances this year, and has recorded five or more strikeouts 14 times. He has yet to play on back-to-back days, and has thrown more streaks (five times) than one day off.
Whether this is the best way to use Senzatela is a different question; I doubt it’s an ideal pattern to use a relief pitcher for one inning of great effort every other day, so I’m always happy when a team (even the Rockies) thinks outside the box.
All this means that although Senzatela plays shorter intervals than he did when he started the game, he does not just close his eyes, Joe Kellying drives home the ball very quickly.
Still, he’s throwing two miles per hour harder than last year. That’s big, because Senzatela who uses four seamers was still scary last year.
On Baseball Savant’s statistical leaderboard, the three least important pitches in baseball (and four of the bottom five) last year were four-seam fastballs thrown by the Rockies. Senzatela’s hitter wasn’t as bad as Angel Chivilli’s or Bradley Blalock’s, but he threw 56.9% of four-seamers as a starter with the highest workload. That comes in 1,299 instances where opponents hit .538.
This year, Senzatela has been one of the best fastball pitchers in the league. And while I wouldn’t want to downplay the added value of the 2.2-mph uptick in velocity, that’s the only thing that’s changed about his four-seamer.
But that’s not the only fastball Senzatela throws.
In 2025, Senzatela played with the sink in April and the cutter went down. He didn’t bowl that often – about 100 seamers for every sinker and 30 seamers for every cutter – and for good reason. He threw 12 sinkers last year and had one strikeout while giving up four balls in play. Those four balls in play: one groundout and three hits, including a 433-yard home run.
Apparently there is a part of Coors Field where 433 feet is a wallcraper. Still, you wouldn’t think throwing that much of a pitch is a good idea.
Senzatela threw the sink several times before dislocating his knee five years ago, and now he’s reintroducing it to his collection. And importantly, he throws it almost like a four-seamer. Opponents have .214 batting averages against both his sinker and four-seamer.
And they hit just .143 off his cutter, which has become his best pitch. Cutter, who averaged a hair under 92 mph, avoided the need for a hard slider. That was his first breaking ball last year, and opponents registered a .330 batting average and seven home runs against him. It was an albatross, and he has only thrown it 14 times this season.
Now, Senzatela throws his quads and a cutter about a third of the time each, to both lefties and righties. Right-handed hitters also get a heavy dose of sinkers; all same-handed hitters get 82% of fastballs off Senzatela. Lefties see fewer sinks, but more changeups and curveballs. Both pitches are coming up fast – both relative to last year and relative to league average – with solid movement and not much of a drop.
Senzatela has completely reinvented itself. Last year, he was throwing fastballs and breaking loops. Now, he hits the batsmen with a full set of fastballs. That means I have to drop a dollar on both the Ben Clemens Memorial “He’s got to learn the cutter” insulting pitcher and the Zack Crizer Foundation’s Three-Fastball Solution collection plate.
Of course, I was surprised. One of the worst starting pitchers in baseball has turned into a successful multi-inning pitcher, just by learning the cutter. There is magic in that field.
