Edgardo Henriquez has a gift. He can throw a baseball faster than all but a few humans in history.
Yet he prefers to think of it as something he and God created together, not something that was just given to him.
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“We’ve worked for that,” said Henriquez, who frequently uses the plural pronoun when talking about himself. “All the work, the effort, the physics. And God’s reward, most of all.”
Wherever the lightning in his right arm came from, he’s making good use of it. Of the 92 pitches he’s thrown this season through Wednesday’s game, when he pitched a scoreless inning, 28 have topped 101 miles per hour. The fastest hit 103.3 mph on the radar gun last Saturday, making it the hardest-thrown pitch by a Dodger since Statcast began tracking speed in 2015 and likely the fastest pitch in franchise history.
Henriquez, 23, shrugs and smiles at the numbers.
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“Now we have to stay consistent,” he said in Spanish. “Even growing up in Venezuela, I always threw hard.”
What he didn’t do in Venezuela was pitch because when he signed as a 16-year-old in 2018, Henriquez was a catcher. The Dodgers moved him to the other side of the plate a year later, when they got him to their Dominican academy.
The process was not a smooth one. The right-hander allowed 22 runs in 30 innings in his first season. Then, after sitting out the summer of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he came to the U.S. a year later and went 2-3 with a 4.93 ERA in 13 games split between the Arizona Complex League and Single A Rancho Cucamonga.
The Dodgers projected him as a starter but after Henriquez missed the 2023 season to Tommy John surgery, he came back throwing gas and the team moved him to the bullpen. The results were spectacular, with Henriquez climbing four levels, from Low A Rancho Cucamonga to the majors, in six months to make his big-league debut in the final week of the regular season.
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And he announced his presence with authority, topping 101 mph twice to earn the save in his third game.
Henriquez grew up in Cumaná, a historic beach city of about half a million people wedged between the Manzanares River and Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, 250 miles east of Caracas. The oldest continuously inhabited Spanish settlement in South America, it has been the birthplace of poets and presidents. But baseball players? Not so much.
Pitcher…