Randy Rodríguez's last pitch left the park. On Tuesday he threw the next one

Milwaukee#

The last pitch was a slider. It was the second pitch of the at-bat, on a one-ball count, with two out in the bottom of the ninth inning at American Family Field on a Friday night in August, the score tied at four. William Contreras hit it into the seats in left center. It was his fourteenth home run of the season and the game was over.

Randy Rodríguez had come in to get one out in the eighth, with San Francisco behind by a run, and he got it, a strikeout of Brandon Lockridge on a fastball. The Giants tied it in the top of the ninth on a double and a single. He went back out. Andruw Monasterio flew out to right on a full count. Brice Turang grounded out on the first pitch. Then Contreras.

The date was August 22, 2025. The box score gives 41,716 people and two hours and 52 minutes. It gives Rodríguez one inning, one hit, one run, one strikeout and fifteen pitches, and it gives him the loss.

He did not pitch in another game for 417 days.

Santo Domingo#

He was born in Santo Domingo on September 5, 1999. That was the summer Randy Johnson was on his way to the first of four consecutive Cy Young Awards, in Arizona. Rodríguez's maternal grandfather was a Yankees fan who also loved Johnson, MLB.com's Maria Guardado reported in June 2025, and Johnson is where the boy's first name came from.

The Giants signed him on July 2, 2017, the first day of that year's international signing period. MLB.com reported the bonus as $50,000. He was seventeen. The next summer he pitched in the Dominican Summer League and spent late July to early September of it on the disabled list. In 2019 he pitched in the Arizona League and his earned run average was 5.40. There was no minor league season in 2020.

"I didn't always dream of playing in the big leagues," he told Guardado, in Spanish. "I didn't even know it was possible. I just wanted to play."

San Jose#

The first place in the Bay Area that saw him pitch regularly was San Jose, in the 2021 season, for the San Jose Giants. He made 32 appearances, all in relief, and threw 62 innings. He struck out 101 batters and walked 23. His earned run average was 1.74. The league named him its pitcher of the month at the end of August.

On November 19 that year the Giants put him on the 40-man roster, which is the list a club has to protect a player on or risk losing him. It did not mean he was close. The next two seasons were spent climbing through Eugene, Richmond and Sacramento, and the walks are the story of those years. In Sacramento in 2023 he walked 37 batters in 37 and two-thirds innings. The next spring, in the Cactus League, he walked eight in four innings.

The Giants optioned him to Sacramento in March 2024. He walked four in ten and two-thirds innings there, and on May 2 they called him up. His first major league game was two days later, in Philadelphia, two and a third innings and two strikeouts.

"I'm not really sure what I did to control that," he told MLB.com the following June, about the walks. "In my mind, I just want to attack the strike zone. When I miss with a pitch, I want the next pitch to be in the strike zone. I think that makes it easier."

He finished the 2024 season with a 4.30 earned run average in 35 games. In the middle of August the club put him on the injured list with inflammation in his right elbow. He came back on September 27, the season's final weekend.

Truist Park#

The record of the 2025 season is short and very good. Fifty games. Fifty and two-thirds innings. Sixty-seven strikeouts and eleven walks. Ten earned runs, and a 1.78 earned run average.

Guardado's June profile is where the rest of him is. It reported that before day games in San Francisco he would stop at a Philz Coffee and buy drinks for himself and for four members of the club's media relations staff, and that he had bought an insulated cooler to carry them to the ballpark. It reported that the pitching coach, J.P. Martinez, called him "sneaky cerebral," and that he was one of the few players regularly reading books in the clubhouse. He had recently finished a Spanish translation of The Count of Monte Cristo and was partway through a Joël Dicker mystery.

"I don't like any specific genres," he said. "If someone recommends a book to me, I'll read it. I like to read stories."

Erik Miller, the left-hander who was his throwing partner, put the pitching more simply in the same piece. "If he just throws it anywhere in the strike zone, he's going to get guys out," Miller said.

On July 15 he pitched in the All-Star Game, at Truist Park outside Atlanta. He came into the top of the seventh with two runners on base that were not his. The first batter he faced, Brent Rooker, hit a home run that scored both of them. He walked Maikel Garcia, got Byron Buxton on a line drive and Bobby Witt Jr. on a ground ball that scored Garcia. Jazz Chisholm Jr. reached on an error, and Rodríguez left after seventeen pitches with two outs. The National League won.

It was the first time he had been an All-Star. He was 25.

San Diego#

On Monday, August 18, at Petco Park, he pitched the ninth inning of a Giants win and got the save. One inning, one hit, no runs, 23 pitches.

The box scores do not carry the rest of that August. In the story MLB.com published on August 30, after the Giants said he needed Tommy John surgery, Andrés Soto reported that the elbow had been sore throughout the season and that the pain had not gone away since 2024, despite the club's efforts to manage his workload. It reported that after San Diego, Rodríguez said the pain in his elbow felt "intolerable." He pitched once more, four days later, in Milwaukee. The club shut him down that Sunday.

The record does not say how the elbow felt in Milwaukee, and he has not said in anything published. The year around those four days is on the record. By MLB.com's reporting at the time, the 1.78, the All-Star selection, the strikeouts and the coffee carried in from Philz all came from a man pitching with an elbow that hurt.

The one thing he said about it, in that same story, was about the people who had been working on it.

"The trainers have been doing a great job," he said. "They've kept me ready to play."

Before he decided, MLB.com reported, he took a day, talked to his agent, and talked to Juan Sánchez, a Giants prospect who had had the same operation in June 2024. He looked at injections, and at rest and rehabilitation. He chose surgery. Bob Melvin, then the manager, told reporters that a pitcher who comes in to get the big outs had been, for a while, "probably the most important role we had."

The operation was on Wednesday, September 24, 2025. He was 26.

Scottsdale#

Scottsdale Stadium is on East Osborn Road, and it is the Giants' spring training ballpark. In October it belongs to the Arizona Fall League, which is where clubs send prospects for extra games, and sometimes send a pitcher coming back from an operation who needs innings against real hitters.

The Giants sent Rodríguez there. The Scottsdale Scorpions activated him from their own injured list on September 15. The league opened on October 3, and in its first ten days he did not pitch.

On Tuesday, October 13, 2026, the Scorpions played the Peoria Javelinas at 6:30 in the evening. He started the game. That is the record's word for it, and it means only that he threw the first pitch. It was a fastball, and it was a ball.

The batter, Tai Peete, flied out to center on the next one. Ike Irish took two sliders for balls, swung through a fastball, and lifted the next one into foul ground in left for Brendan Summerhill. Then Brandon Butterworth took a sinker for a strike, took a slider for a ball, took a slider for a strike, fouled off a fastball, and swung through another one.

Eleven pitches. No hits, no walks, no runs, one strikeout. Peoria scored all thirteen of its runs after he was gone and won by eight.

It had been 384 days since the operation and 417 since the slider in Milwaukee. The last batter he had faced before Tuesday hit his final pitch over the fence to end a game. The last batter he faced on Tuesday swung through a fastball to end an inning.

Sources: MLB Stats API: Randy Rodríguez player record, transactions, awards and year-by-year and game-log pitching statistics (majors, minors and Arizona Fall League); play-by-play and box score, Giants at Milwaukee, August 22, 2025 (game 776634); play-by-play and box score, 2025 All-Star Game (game 778566); play-by-play, Peoria at Scottsdale, October 13, 2026 (game 867712); Giants club record (spring venue). Maria Guardado, MLB.com, "This Giants breakout relief star loves books, coffee & K's," June 11, 2025. Andrés Soto, MLB.com, "All-Star Rodríguez to undergo Tommy John surgery," August 30, 2025. Tristi Rodriguez, NBC Sports Bay Area, on the date of the surgery, September 25, 2025.