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When I announced my intention to write about Antonio Senzatela, Jon Becker burst into my Slack DMs like the Kool-Aid Man to demand I use a Penn and Teller-based headline. Credit where 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 smarter and better, but there are a few things I miss about the old days. Foremost among them is Nichols’ Law of Catcher Defense, an old pre-sabermetrics axiom which states the following: A catcher’s defensive reputation is inversely proportional to his offensive abilities.

Now that we can evaluate a catcher’s defense empirically, we can prove that Austin Hedges or Patrick Bailey, or [Insert Guardians Backstop here] is, in fact, a good defender, rather than throwing up our hands and assuming there must be some reason they keep getting work.

There’s a related fallacy regarding starting pitchers, which, while true, has not been formally stated as far as I know. (As an aside, it is my no. 1 career goal to end up on the greatest Wikipedia page: List of eponymous laws. If someone wanted to formalize Baumann’s Corollary to Nichols’ Law and post it there, that’d be neat.)

Back to the original point: A starting pitcher’s strikeout rate is negatively correlated to his reputed ability to generate soft contact. Surely, if he’s not striking opponents out, he must be good at something.

You know how I know that’s not true? Antonio Senzatela.

If you wanted to pick an avatar for the current Rockies regime’s time in the wilderness, Senzatela would be a good choice. A reliable innings-eating youngster on the last good Colorado teams of 2017 and 2018, Senzatela has lasted a decade in the big leagues with a career strikeout rate of 14.9%. Among pitchers currently on active rosters, with a minimum of 200 career innings, that’s the second-lowest strikeout rate. He also has the highest career opponent batting average of that group: .290.

Senzatela has the eighth-highest ERA since 2010 among pitchers with at least 500 innings pitched, though eight of the top nine names on that list are Rockies, so maybe it’s unfair to single him out. He has his positive attributes — decent fastball velocity, high groundball rate, relatively low walk rate — but this is a pitcher who was born to be sacrificed to the God of Innings and forgotten when arbitration hits. Instead, the Rockies gave him a five-year contract extension.

That contract turned out to be a nightmare, even by Colorado’s standards. Senzatela pitched around a couple minor 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 the torn ACL in early 2023, made two appearances, and blew out his elbow, wiping out almost all 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, a 6.97 ERA, and a 5.48 FIP. He struck out 11.8% of opponents, which was the worst figure among 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 stand this any longer, and so as of 2026, Senzatela is a relief pitcher. And for the first time in the length of his extension, he is finally making good.

Over 33 innings and 16 relief appearances, he has an ERA of 1.36. I know! I couldn’t believe it either!

If you take “believe” to mean “think Senzatela will continue to put up Prime Dennis Eckersley numbers,” there’s reason to be skeptical. Senzatela’s running a .198 BABIP, an 87.8% strand rate, and a 5.4% HR/FB rate, which is a little over a third of what it usually is. All of those are big, honking regression indicators.

But where should we expect Senzatela to regress to? Well, his FIP is 3.19 and his xERA is 3.09. Not only are those numbers really good for a multi-inning reliever, full stop, they’re also about half of what he was running last year. That’s a huge improvement. He’s like a new pitcher.

So what’s different?

The Rockies have done some weird stuff with bullpen roles this season (pre-injury Chase Dollander’s stint as the world’s greatest bulk reliever comes to mind), and they’ve been similarly creative with Senzatela. He’s faced at least four batters in all 16 of his appearances this year, and recorded five or more outs on 14 occasions. He’s yet to pitch on back-to-back days, and he’s turned over the lineup more often (five times) than he’s pitched on just one day’s rest.

Whether this is the best way to use Senzatela is a different question; I’m skeptical that the ideal relief pitcher usage pattern is one inning of max effort every other day, so I’m always happy when a team (even the Rockies) thinks outside the box.

All this is to say that while Senzatela is pitching in shorter stints than he did as a starter, he’s not just going out there, closing his eyes, and Joe Kellying the ball to home plate as hard as he can.

Nevertheless, he’s throwing two miles an hour harder than he did last year. That’s massive, because Senzatela’s four-seamer was horrendous last year.

On Baseball Savant’s pitch arsenal stats leaderboard, the three least valuable pitches in baseball (and four of the bottom five) last year were four-seam fastballs thrown by Rockies. Senzatela’s heater wasn’t quite as bad on a rate basis as Angel Chivilli’s or Bradley Blalock’s, but he threw 56.9% four-seamers as a starter with a fairly high workload. That comes to 1,299 instances of a pitch against which opponents slugged .538.

This year, Senzatela has been one of the best fastball pitchers in the league. And while I would never want to underestimate the value add of a 2.2-mph uptick in velocity, that’s the only thing that’s changed about his four-seamer.

But that’s no longer the only fastball Senzatela throws.

In 2025, Senzatela toyed with a sinker in April and a cutter down the stretch. He didn’t throw either that frequently — about 100 four-seamers for every sinker and 30 four-seamers for every cutter — and with good reason. He threw 12 sinkers last year and got one whiff while surrendering four balls in play. Those four balls in play: one groundout and three hits, including a 433-foot home run.

Apparently there’s a part of Coors Field where 433 feet is a wallscraper. Still, you wouldn’t think that throwing more of that pitch is a good idea.

Senzatela threw a sinker fairly frequently before he blew out his knee five years ago, and he’s just now reintroducing it to his repertoire. And importantly, he’s throwing it almost as hard as the four-seamer. Opponents have matching .214 batting averages against both his sinker and four-seamer.

And they’re hitting just .143 against his cutter, which has turned into his best pitch. The cutter, which averages a hair under 92 mph, has obviated the need for a hard slider. That was his primary breaking ball last year, and opponents registered a .330 batting average with seven home runs against it. It was an albatross, and he’s only thrown it 14 times so far this season.

Now, Senzatela is throwing his four-seamer and cutter about a third of the time each, to both lefties and righties. Right-handed hitters are also getting a heavy dose of sinkers; all told, same-handed batters are getting 82% fastballs from Senzatela. Lefties see fewer sinkers, but more changeups and curveballs. Both pitches come in fast — both relative to last year and relative to the league average — with tight movement and not a lot of drop.

Senzatela has completely reinvented himself. Last year, he was throwing batting practice fastballs and slop breaking stuff. Now, he’s steamrolling hitters with a full set of fastballs. That means I have to drop a dollar in both the Ben Clemens Memorial “He should learn a cutter” swear jar and the collection plate for the Zack Crizer Foundation for the Three-Fastball Solution.

Truly, I’m awestruck. One of the worst starting pitchers in baseball has turned into a dominant multi-inning reliever, just by learning a cutter. There’s magic in that pitch.