While it’s not impossible to come out of nowhere and surprise me when it comes to the Cincinnati Reds farm system, it doesn’t happen too often. But on Wednesday night that was the case when in the 8th inning of Daytona’s game in Clearwater the Tortugas sent reliever Dalvin Rosario to the mound and he came out throwing in the upper 90’s and on his third pitch hit triple digits. On his final pitch of the inning he matched that one, hitting 100.1 MPH to record his second strikeout of the outing.
If it feels weird that you didn’t know about Dalvin Rosario before Wednesday night or Thursday morning as you read this, don’t be tough on yourself. He pitched in one game in Daytona last week. Before that the last time he was on a mound was in July of 2021 when he was with the Florida Complex League Phillies. The right-hander pitched in two games that season, throwing 3.0 innings before landing on the 60-day injured list. Philadelphia released him less than two weeks after he was injured.
After the game I reached out to Matt Winkelman, who covers the Phillies farm system at Phillies Minor Thoughts. The only report he had on Rosario was from 2019 and he had him throwing 90-92 MPH that season. Rosario originally signed with Philadelphia as a teenager back in 2016 for $200,000.
Rosario, who will turn 25-years-old in June, signed with the Reds as a free agent in October of 2024. The media guide simply says “from 2022-2024 did not pitch in affiliated baseball”. A few searches online can’t find anything suggesting he was pitching anywhere during that time. I will reach out to try and get more information on his backstory on Thursday, but wanted to get this written up because it’s not every day someone comes out of absolute nowhere throwing triple digits. Update: While I still don’t know exactly what all happened between August 2021 and October of 2024 when he signed with Cincinnati, I did get some more information. While he wasn’t pitching in any league we’ve got any sort of information on, he was pitching in a semi-pro league in the Dominican Republic, which is where Reds scouts saw him and ultimately did sign him.
Wednesday night saw Dalvin Rosario face two batters. He struck them both out. But he also threw 15 pitches to do so. Here’s what it looked like:
The pitch classification algorithm had him throwing a 4-seam fastball, a slider, and a curveball. I’m not entirely sure yet which of the two breaking balls he’s throwing, but they seem to be the same pitch. Given that this was his first outing ever with pitch tracking, it hasn’t been tuned to figure it all out just yet.
His fastball worked from 97.3 to 100.1 MPH on the day and had decently high spin rates that topped out at 2532 RPM. The breaking ball worked between 80.0-84.2 and had a lower spin rate than the fastball – something that you don’t see too often.