Thirty-Five Pitches

On June 17 in Milwaukee, Daniel Espino came out of the Cleveland bullpen and threw twelve pitches. Eight of them were fastballs over 99 miles an hour. The first one registered 100.8.

He faced three hitters and got all three, two by strikeout. Cleveland lost 9-4.

"That was obviously the highlight of the night," manager Stephen Vogt told reporters afterward. "Knowing everything Daniel's been through."

The last time anyone had seen that fastball in a game was April 29, 2022.

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He's from Panama City, and he left it for Georgia in 2016, when he was fifteen — first a program in Albany, then Georgia Premier Academy in Statesboro. Cleveland took him twenty-fourth overall in 2019 and signed him for $2.5 million.

In 2021 he struck out 152 hitters in 91⅔ innings across Low-A Lynchburg and High-A Lake County. By the following spring MLB Pipeline had him eleventh in all of baseball, up from around fiftieth on the previous list. Baseball America named his fastball the best in the Cleveland system and his slider the best in the Cleveland system. FanGraphs called him a unicorn.

He opened 2022 at Double-A Akron with 35 strikeouts in 18⅓ innings over four starts. One of them was a fourteen-strikeout game.

The fourth start was April 29. He went 4⅔ innings. Then the record goes dark.

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It began as knee tendinitis, about two months of it, and by the time the knee was right the shoulder wasn't. In February 2023 the Guardians said he had a strain of his subscapularis and a tear of the anterior capsule in that same shoulder, and shut him down from throwing for eight weeks. In May, Dr. Neal ElAttrache repaired the anterior capsule in Los Angeles. The timeline handed out was twelve to fourteen months. That was 2023.

In November his father died.

Danilo Espino had practiced medicine for thirty years, ulcers and diabetes, and MLB.com reported that in Panama they called him el doctor de manos milagrosas — the doctor with the miracle hands — for the patients he helped avoid amputation. It was prostate cancer.

On March 14, 2024, Espino had a second operation on the same shoulder, the capsule again and the rotator cuff. That was 2024.

Between April 2022 and the end of 2025 he pitched in five minor-league games and four fall-league outings. The one start he made for Triple-A Columbus in September 2025 was the first game he had pitched since April 29, 2022.

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He was in big-league camp in March. Before a start against Arizona at Salt River Fields, per that same MLB.com account, he bent down and drew the number 14 in the dirt. His father's birthday was February 14. Fourteen is retired in Cleveland for Larry Doby, so he wears 41 there.

The Guardians optioned him to Columbus on March 8. "I'm just happy he's healthy," Vogt said.

They recalled him on June 12.

"Crying, I was crying a lot," he told Sports Illustrated that week. "It's been really emotional days. I got told Wednesday afternoon, and from there, just talking to family, we're all here."

And: "It speaks for itself that I'm able to sit here and talk to you. How everybody from the front office and how they believed in me from those times."

Five days later he threw the pitch at 100.8.

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The fastball came back. Scouting reports before the surgeries had him sitting in the mid-90s and touching 100 or 101. Over his 18⅔ innings at Columbus before the June recall he averaged 97.9 and topped out at 100.7, and in Milwaukee he threw 100.8 on the first pitch of his major-league life. Sports Illustrated noted that his debut graded in the 90th percentile or better in whiff rate, swinging-strike rate, hard-hit rate and velocity — every box a stuff model checks.

"Obviously, once I'm dialed pretty much like it's pretty hard to hit me," he said that night.

What hasn't come back is length.

On July 2 against the White Sox he relieved Slade Cecconi in the sixth and got five outs — one hit, one walk, two strikeouts, nothing across — on 35 pitches. It was the longest he had pitched in a game since April 29, 2022.

Thirty-five was the number. A healthy starter comes out somewhere around a hundred.

"We had to kind of talk with the medical staff, talk with the pitching team," Vogt said, "what are exactly his maximums, and it's 35 pitches."

Two days later Cleveland optioned him to Columbus and recalled Franco Aleman. Not for the outing. He had just thrown thirty-five pitches, and a bullpen in July needs an arm that can go again tomorrow.

That leaves him at five major-league appearances and nine strikeouts, and a 5.40 ERA — earned runs per nine innings, on nothing close to nine innings.

At Columbus he's at 4.38 by the same measure, over 24⅔ innings. Before the June recall he'd walked fifteen men there in 18⅔ innings while striking out twenty-nine. That's 7.2 walks per nine. The strikeouts came back with the fastball. The command hasn't.

The whole Triple-A season is 460 tracked pitches, which isn't enough of anything to argue with in either direction.

Our own engine ranks Triple-A arms by the quality of their stuff, and through July 24 Espino sat fourth among the 683 arms it tracks. He'd been fourth for six days running — though six daily readings off one accumulating season are six looks at the same thing, not six confirmations of it. Across that same week the underlying score eased. The rank held because ranks are sticky.

What that system reads is the pitches — how hard they arrive, how they move, how hard they are to square up. It does not read shoulders. It has no opinion on whether there will be a thirty-sixth pitch.

Neither does anyone else. The Guardians have not said whether he goes back to starting. Since the surgeries, he has never been asked for more than five outs at a time.

He turns twenty-six in January. He is in Columbus, in a bullpen, built up one appearance at a time by a staff that hands him a number before each one.

On July 2 the number was thirty-five. Nobody has said what it will be next time.