Entering 18th pro season, Toronto Blue Jays' Paolo Espino keeps taking the ball

DUNEDIN, Fla. — Eduardo Escobar and Paolo Espino go way back. Like, a decade-and-a-half back to Caracas, where they were Venezuelan Winter League teammates during Barack Obama’s first term. A mere 14 iPhone generations later, they sit a few lockers apart in the Toronto Blue Jays clubhouse this spring, both vying for opportunities to extend their nomadic careers.

Socially, they present a stark contrast. Espino is quiet, reserved. You can find him most mornings sitting serenely at his locker, reading a book on his tablet. Escobar is gregarious, outgoing. He banters through a wide grin with anyone who ventures by.

“I’ll tell you one thing about this guy,” Escobar says, motioning to Espino, still buried in his reading. “You want this guy on your team. He always competes, man. Always. No matter what. You can throw anything at this guy. Go long out of the bullpen, throw a couple more innings the next day, start on short notice — whatever you need him to do. He doesn’t care. He’ll be ready for anything. There’s a reason why this guy’s still pitching.”

Surely, there must be. Only a few pitchers from Espino’s 2006 draft class remain MLBers today — most notably, Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer. Nearly everyone below that future Hall of Famer class has retired, whether willingly or not.

Kris Medlen, who spent a decade in MLB after being selected one pick ahead of Espino in the 10th round, co-owns and operates a training complex outside Atlanta. Josh Roenicke, who went early in the 10th and pitched for four MLB teams, is a realtor in Florida. Andrew Bailey, who went a full four rounds before Espino and made 265 appearances over eight seasons, is entering his seventh year as a member of various MLB coaching staffs.

And yet, as contemporaries steadily faded away around him, Espino kept turning up each spring and taking the ball. Over 17 seasons as a professional pitcher, he’s been a member of a half-dozen MLB organizations, three winterball clubs, and the Panamanian national team. He’s been designated for assignment, granted free agency or straight up released eight times.

This time around, he’s on a minor-league deal with the Blue Jays as a layer of starting pitching depth ticketed for an innings-hauling role with the Buffalo Bisons. The club reached out to his agent in mid-December while Espino was spinning gems in the Dominican Winter League, where he pitched to a 2.40 ERA and 0.904 WHIP across 48.2 innings. He jumped at their offer.

After a challenging, injury-hampered 2023, when a flexor-tendon strain in his right ring finger caused intense pain through his hand and a burning sensation in his forearm, sabotaging his ability to properly grip the ball as he tried to pitch through it, Espino wasn’t sure another MLB opportunity would come his way.

“I’m really grateful to still be here, at my age, competing for an opportunity to stay in the big leagues,” says a 37-year-old, who somehow still has a minor-league option remaining. “I’m here to do anything. Whatever is needed. However many innings they need. If I have to start, I’ll start. If I have to come out of the pen, I’ll come out of the pen. I know that’s my role. I have to be able to do everything to be able to stay in the game.”

That’s what Espino has done for the last four seasons with the Washington Nationals, who used him as an anytime, anywhere innings vacuum. He worked to a 4.91 ERA across 233 innings with the club, finishing nearly as many games (31) as he started (39).

He made short-notice spot starts; he mopped up blowouts in relief; he rescued injured or struggling starters from early-game disasters and carried the ball through middle innings; he even closed a game on a day Washington’s bullpen was stretched to its limits, retiring the heart of the Philadelphia Phillies order to record his first and only career save.

All that after throwing more than 1,300 minor-league innings over the span of a decade before making his big-league debut at 30 with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2017. Espino merely making it to the majors and appearing in 12 games that season was an uplifting story of perseverance and resolve. Never mind that, after spending the subsequent three seasons in the minors, he fought his way back to the show in 2020 at 33, and this time hung around for 82 appearances with the Nationals.

And all while working in the high-80s. Espino’s fastball will sit 89 mph on his best days and often hover a couple ticks below that, as he tries to pick corners, scrape edges, and set up his true separator: a slow, arcing, high-spin curveball that drops over 70 inches on its way to the plate.

“A lot of guys throwing 100 these days — but there aren’t many guys who throw 88 and never miss the corners,” Escobar says. “And then throw you this crazy curveball. That thing’s crazy. It’s so slow. I’ve faced him a lot. I think I have maybe one base hit. Bunch of punch outs. I know other guys throw harder. But this guy has such good command.”

To Escobar’s point, Espino ranks within MLB’s 94th percentile in both walk rate and called-strike percentage among the 679 pitchers to throw at least 50 innings over the last three seasons. And among all curveballs in 2022, no pitcher threw with more vertical movement, only nine featured a higher spin rate and just two averaged less velocity than Espino’s 71.3 mph. It’s a pitch profile today’s hitters seldom see.

He spins the crap out of his slider, too, flinging it from one edge of the plate to the other; and he’ll flash an 84-mph changeup arm-side to lefties. But it isn’t like he’s hiding from his Texas state speed limit fastball. Across his four seasons with the Nationals, Espino used it over half the time.

“I was throwing 90 in high school — which, when I was in high school, was a pretty good speed,” Espino says. “Now, 95 is normal. I don’t think I’m going to throw that. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to really spin my curveball.”

When Espino was being scouted as a high schooler in the early 2000s — he moved away from his family in Panama as a teenager to chase his dream of pitching professionally at the IMG Academy in Florida — baseball wasn’t yet quantifying these things. But Espino’s ridiculous breaking stuff was impossible to miss via the eye test. As his career wore on, and clubs began utilizing technology to better assess the quality of a pitcher’s stuff, his utility only became clearer.

“The way I throw my curveball — I’m not afraid to say it — is what’s been keeping me in the game,” Espino says. “Even in Little League and high school, I always knew that my curveball was good, because I can see the shape and I could use it to get a lot of swing-and-miss. But over my years in pro ball, all these stats and TrackMan data come around, and now everyone’s telling me my curveball has a really high spin rate and a lot of movement. I was like, ‘Great. When do I pitch next?’”

That’s the other thing keeping Espino around — a rubber arm and willingness to take the ball any time in any role. In 2021, his season debut was a 4.1-inning, two-run effort as a last-minute emergency starter in place of an injured Stephen Strasburg. Two months of mop-up relief later, he took over for an injured Max Scherzer one batter into an outing, allowing only a run over 3.1 innings. Two weeks after that, Espino started on short rest and went five shutout innings after throwing 41 pitches in relief 48 hours earlier.

It's a tough way to make a living. Which, it must be said, is another thing keeping Espino around. If he wasn’t playing baseball here, he’d be playing it somewhere. You don’t exactly get rich spending the first 11 years of your career in the minors. And you don’t compensate for all your sacrifice with just two full years of MLB service following it. Put it this way — last year wasn’t Espino’s 11th playing winterball because he still has something to prove.

Espino has two kids: a four-year-old son, Mateo, who’s starting prekindergarten this year, and a seven-year-old daughter, Alana, who’s in Grade 1. His wife, Leslie, stays home in Orlando to take care of them while Espino is off pitching wherever the game has taken him. He is his family’s sole source of income. And it only gets harder and harder each time he leaves.

“Once my daughter got into kindergarten, that’s when it got really tough. Because I missed her graduation — it was in June. And now she thinks I’m going to miss every single one of her graduations. She keeps asking me if I’m going to be there next time,” Espino says. “But it’s a sacrifice I have to make. I know one day I’ll be done playing and I’ll be home with them most of the time. Hopefully, I don’t have to miss too much more.”

The rest of Espino’s family lives in Panama City, where he was born, and the last chance he got to visit them was in December 2022. His parents haven’t seen him or their grandchildren in over a year. Like he said, it’s a sacrifice.

But it’s one he keeps making. After the Nationals released him to open a 40-man roster spot last August, Espino went straight into an extensive rehabilitation for his damaged finger tendon, driving an hour each way on Florida’s I-4 from Orlando to Lakeland three times a week.

There’s still something wrong in there — an area of tissue in his palm remains hard to the touch. He’ll probably need surgery on it someday. But, for now, diligent physical therapy has helped him regain finger extension, while cortisone shots have alleviated the intense pain he was experiencing. It doesn’t have to feel perfect. At his age, with a couple thousand professional innings behind him, Espino knows he’ll have to pitch through some stuff the rest of the way.

By mid-September, he was ready to start building up to compete again. And less than a month later, he was off to La Romana, where he threw the third-most innings of any Dominican Winter League pitcher and lead all qualifiers in ERA and WHIP. His final winter league start was Jan. 16. The next day, he flew home to Florida and reported early to Blue Jays camp in Dunedin. Espino could’ve stolen a week or two off in there if he wanted to. He didn’t.

“I love being here. I love playing baseball. I love pitching. I love the challenge. I love being part of the team. I love all of this,” he says. “And I love learning. I’m constantly learning from all these young guys, all these new tools that are coming into the game. Every day, I feel like I learn something new.”

Espino says he doesn’t feel his age and that he reckons his arm has a couple more seasons left in it. It’s not like he relies on velocity. And the curveball is still a hammer. He has struck out a third of the batters he has faced this spring, working to a 3.75 ERA across 12 innings while walking only a pair. Something he’s doing still works. Whether he keeps getting opportunities to test that is another story.

But he has one now, which is one more than many thought he’d get after a roughshod 2023, and perhaps one more than they’d have thought when he was toiling in the minors through his late-20s. But that’s the Paolo Espino story. He hasn’t been handed anything over 17 years as a professional, yet he has outlasted just about everyone in his draft class aside from the Hall of Famers. He can’t tell you there’s a secret to it. He just keeps turning up each spring and taking the ball.

“I've been through a lot. My wife and my kids, too,” Espino says. “And my family just supports me in everything that I do. I love them. They’re always there for me. We’ve been through a lot of stuff; we've been in and out of a lot of crazy moments. So, it's just nice to still be here, at my age, competing for a job. Competing for an opportunity to stay in the big leagues.”