The best Latin American starting pitcher in baseball signed out of Venezuela for just $25,000. He never ranked as a Top 100 prospect, he’s never made an All-Star team, and like many of his peers, turned to pitching as a matter of pure practicality.
“The thing is, there are too many position players in Latin America,” Philadelphia Phillies left-hander Ranger Suárez said. “So, I went opposite. A pitcher. It helped me stand out a little bit.”
Suárez, 28, leads the Majors with a 1.70 ERA. After 13 seasons of professional baseball, he has slowly but surely traced an increasingly rare path: one that goes from Latin America to the top of a Major League rotation.
Numbers from the league office show roughly 25 percent of Major League players come from Latin America and the Caribbean, but less than 15 percent of starting pitchers belong to that demographic. The position player leaderboard is loaded with Latin American superstars (20 of the top 50 according to FanGraphs WAR), but only eight of the top 50 starting pitchers in ERA are Latin American.
The imbalance defies surface-level expectations. In the age of Juan Soto, Ronald Acuna Jr., and Elly De La Cruz, baseball lacks an obvious heir to Félix Hernández and Pedro Martinez as the next great Latin American ace. Twelve of the 25 hardest-throwing position players are Latin American, and so are 11 of the 25 hardest-throwing pitchers, so why aren’t more of them starting pitchers?
The top American players tend to both pitch and hit at least through high school, and many emerge as legitimate pitching prospects only after their bodies and skills further develop in college. Justin Verlander, who grew up in Virginia and is now one of the best starting pitchers of his generation, went undrafted out of high school but was the second overall pick after three years at Old Dominion University.
Few Latin American players have an opportunity to follow that path. They often sign as young as 16 years old, and many Latin American big leaguers — even the ones with the strongest arms — tell stories of choosing a position when they were very young, then staying there. As long as they can hit, even the strongest throwers are shunted away from the mound.
Today Kenley Jansen is one of the most accomplished relief pitchers of all time with the fifth-most saves in Major League history, but when Jansen was signed out of Curacao as a 17-year-old in 2004, he was a catcher, and remained so for years despite his electric arm. When he finally moved to the mound in 2009, he was in the big leagues within a year.
“If I were an American kid, I would not be a catcher in the minor leagues,” Jansen said. “Some coach would have already turned me into a pitcher. I would have never hit in professional baseball. They would have recognized the arm.”