Francisco Rodríguez

Francisco Rodríguez burst onto the scene in the 2002 playoffs at age 20. He finished with 437 saves — fourth most in major-league history. (Brian Bahr / Getty Images Sports)

On Wednesday, September 18, 2002, the Anaheim Angels1 and Oakland Athletics faced off in the third game of a four-game set in Oakland. The two teams were locked in a tight battle for supremacy in the American League West Division as the season reached its final weeks. The A’s won this game, 7-4, to pull into a tie with the Angels for first place with identical 95-57 records. Oakland won again the next day to pull into first place for good, ultimately winning the division by four games over the 99-63 Angels. The Angels’ record was good enough to capture the American League’s lone wild-card berth.

While the game on September 18 marked the last time the A’s trailed the Angels in the division race, it was perhaps most notable for a seemingly minor event that took place in the bottom of the eighth inning. Making his major-league debut, 20-year-old Francisco Rodríguez entered the game to pitch the inning for Anaheim, facing four batters, allowing one hit, and striking out two in 16 pitches.

The lanky right-hander appeared in only four more games over the remainder of the regular season, but opened some eyes by not allowing a run and striking out 13 in just 5⅔ innings. Unexpectedly added to the Angels’ postseason roster, Rodríguez announced himself with authority to the baseball world with a dominating run through the 2002 playoffs, amassing a 5-1 record with 28 strikeouts in 18⅔ innings in 11 appearances as the lockdown set-up man for closer Troy Percival. The Angels captured their first World Series title, winning in seven games over the San Francisco Giants. A pitching star was born.

That star went on to become one of the most dominant, consistent, and reliable relief pitchers in baseball for the next 15 years, along the way making six All-Star teams and leaving the game with the majors’ fourth-most career saves.

Francisco Jose Rodríguez was born on January 7, 1982 in Caracas, Venezuela, the capital city of the South American country, and grew up in Maracao, a parish about 25 kilometers southwest of Caracas. Just a few months after his birth, his parents, Francisco Rodríguez and Isabel Mayorca, split up and turned him over to his paternal grandparents, Juan and Isabel Rodríguez, to raise him. His father lived with him and his grandparents intermittently in his first few years, but moved out for good when the younger Francisco was 4 years old. His mother also lived in Maracao while Rodríguez was growing up, but was distinctly uninterested in her son. When he attempted to visit her, she turned him away quickly. “When you’re seven or eight years old, you want to see your mom,” he said. “I still ask myself, Why? Why wasn’t she there, even for 10 minutes?”2 Rodríguez has 13 “siblings” – six via his father, four from his mother. Three uncles that he grew up with he calls brothers.3

Rodríguez spent his formative years living in a two-bedroom apartment with those paternal grandparents, whom he called Mom and Dad; the apartment frequently served as home for various other family members. “We were poor,” Rodríguez recalled in 2002. “I never had new shoes or new T-shirts. But we were all together.”4 Growing up on the streets of Maracao, Rodríguez acquired the nickname Nene Fran (Baby Fran), a name that continued to resonate in the area even after his star turn in the major leagues.5

Rodríguez often tagged along to baseball games played by his uncles, imitating the action on the field. A stranger approached his grandmother and suggested that she enroll him in a baseball school. The stranger, Graciano Ravelo, operated one such school, and accepted the seven-year-old to the academy. The Graciano Ravelo Baseball School was a ramshackle operation founded by Ravelo, a scout for the Texas Rangers, in the 1970s to help develop baseball talent and also help keep kids in Caracas out of trouble. The school was over an hour away from Maracao via public transportation; since Rodríguez couldn’t afford the small monthly fee, Ravelo waived it.6

When he was 15 years old, Rodríguez was a well-known shortstop and pitcher. He was only 5-feet-8 and 155 pounds, but his fastball was still regularly recorded above 90 mph. In 1998 Ravelo attempted to sign Rodríguez for the Rangers for a bonus of $120,000, but Rodríguez decided to wait before committing to a professional team. After a strong showing while pitching for the Venezuelan national team in a youth tournament, he was showered up with offers from several clubs that dwarfed the $120,000 the Rangers had put on the table. In September 1998 the Anaheim Angels signed the 16-year-old Rodríguez to a contract with a $900,000 signing bonus, the largest the franchise had ever given to an international prospect at that time. The bonus money allowed him and his family to leave the crowded two-bedroom apartment in Maracao for a four-bedroom apartment in the more affluent La Urbina section, east of Caracas. It also allowed Rodríguez to purchase a 1998 Ford Explorer – one with an Angels decal on the windshield to uniquely identify its owner.

Rodríguez reported to the Angels camp in Arizona in the spring of 1999 for his first professional season but returned home in April to be with his ailing grandfather. He was slated to travel back to the United States on April 25, and before leaving was given a word of instruction by his grandfather.

“Don’t come back here if something happens to me,” Juan Francisco told his grandson. “You stay there and show them you can play baseball.”7 Juan Francisco died within minutes of Francisco’s flight leaving for Arizona.

As a 17-year-old new to professional baseball and the United States, Rodríguez split his season between 12 appearances with the Butte Copper Kings of the Rookie Pioneer League and one appearance with the Low-A Boise Hawks of the Northwest League. He made 10 starts in his 13 games, going a combined 2-1 with a 3.49 ERA and 75 strikeouts in 56⅔ innings pitched. In the 2000 season, still just 18 years old, Rodríguez advanced to the Lake Elsinore Storm of the High-A California League. Still working primarily as a starter, Rodríguez posted a 2.81 ERA and again struck out well over a batter per inning (79 strikeouts in 64 innings pitched). The combined performances and raw stuff displayed before turning 19 years old led Baseball America to rank Rodríguez the minor leagues’ number-71 prospect before the 2001 season.8 A 2001 season that saw Rodríguez struggle to a 5.38 ERA as a starter at High-A Rancho Cucamonga set the stage for the whirlwind of 2002.

While working as a starting pitcher during his first three seasons in professional baseball, Rodríguez often experienced elbow and shoulder tendinitis that would cause pain on the days after he pitched and limited his progress and on-field performance. His focus and concentration also seemed to wander while he pitched only about once a week. In the winter between the 2001 and 2002 seasons, the Angels organization decided to give Rodríguez a try as a reliever.

The move worked. After three seasons of performances that ranged between all right and pretty good, Rodríguez became dominant out of the bullpen. He began 2002 at Arkansas of the Double-A Texas League, and overwhelmed the competition. He posted a 1.96 ERA, and his previously strong 3-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio grew to 4-to-1, all while his hits allowed per nine innings dropped from 10.1 at Rancho Cucamonga in 2001 to 6.7 in 2002. By mid-June Rodríguez had accomplished all that there was to do at Double A and was promoted to Triple-A Salt Lake City. His performance at Triple A was nearly identical to what he had done at Arkansas, and when the Salt Lake season ended in early September Rodríguez was called up to the Angels.

After a few weeks of inactivity, Rodríguez made his major-league debut in that September 18 game at Oakland. Four months shy of his 21st birthday, he did not appear in another minor-league game until more than a decade later. He pitched in four more games before the end of the regular season and didn’t allow a run while striking out 13 and allowing three hits in 5⅔ innings. Along the way he tied Nolan Ryan’s Angels record by striking out eight consecutive hitters, a streak that covered his first four career major-league appearances and was snapped by an intentional walk.

On the last day of the regular season, Angels manager Mike Scioscia summoned Rodríguez into his office and gave him the surprising news that he would be a part of Anaheim’s playoff roster. “We liked his composure, his mound presence, his stuff,” said Bud Black, the Angels pitching coach. “We started to say, ‘Hey, this guy can have an impact.’”9

Rodríguez’s inclusion on the Angels playoff roster was a source of some controversy and deep examination of the esoterica of roster rules. Major-league rules at the time required a postseason-eligible player to be on a team’s active 25-man major-league roster before September 1.10 Rodríguez was called up on September 15, two weeks after the cutoff. However, the eligibility rules did allow for injury replacements, Angels pitcher Steve Green had Tommy John surgery the previous offseason and was on the disabled list all season. When it came time to compile their list of 25 eligible players for the playoffs, the Angels replaced Green with Rodríguez. It was perhaps not in line with the spirit of the rules, but was clearly within the letter of the rules, so Rodríguez was in.11

Playoff baseball did not start off well for either the Angels or Rodríguez. They led the New York Yankees 5-4 in the eighth inning of Game One at Yankee Stadium, only to see three relievers (Ben Weber, Scott Schoenweis, and Brendan Donnelly) give up four runs in the bottom half of the inning on the way to an 8-4 loss. The next night Rodríguez entered the postseason cauldron in the sixth inning with the Angels up 4-3. He had two outs with a runner on first and then got ahead of Yankee leadoff hitter Alfonso Soriano 0-and-2. Soriano crushed the next pitch over the left-field fence to put the Yankees up 5-4.

Expecting to be removed from the game after giving up the lead, Rodríguez instead responded to Scioscia’s confidence in him by returning to the mound for the seventh inning and breezing through the Yankees’ Jason Giambi, Bernie Williams, and Robin Ventura in only 11 pitches. The Angels scored three in the eighth and another in the ninth while the bullpen this time held the line and the Angels evened the series at a game apiece with an 8-6 victory.

From that moment forward, Rodríguez was nearly untouchable in the postseason. The Angels played 16 games in defeating the Yankees, Minnesota Twins, and San Francisco Giants and capturing their first World Series title. Rodríguez pitched in 11 of the games, throwing 18⅔ innings with a 1.93 ERA, allowing only 10 hits and striking out 28 of the 70 batters he faced. On a team with decent starting pitching and a deep and effective bullpen, Rodríguez found himself responsible for locking down the crucial seventh and eighth innings ahead of closer Troy Percival. Rodríguez’s dominant performance in the role evoked memories of young Mariano Rivera’s work setting up John Wetteland as the Yankees captured the World Series crown in 1996. His dominance and strikeout-rich appearances led to him being dubbed “K-Rod,” a takeoff on the nickname of Texas Rangers star Álex Rodríguez and using the baseball shorthand for strikeout in place of a first initial. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself to see if this is real,” Rodríguez said during the playoff run. “Am I really in the playoffs? Am I really pitching almost every day? I pinch myself and it hurts, so, yes, this is real.”12

Dominating the best hitters on the major leagues’ biggest stage could have been attributed in part to Rodríguez’s newness, and the hitters not having seen him previously. But it was his raw pitching stuff that was most responsible for his success and the Angels’ confidence in him. “He has an easy, smooth but powerful delivery,” Angels pitching coach Bud Black said. “The fastball comes out of his hand with so much life, and there’s such tremendous snap to his slider that it’s a wipeout pitch.”13

When it was all said and done, Rodríguez became the first pitcher to earn his first major-league win in postseason play and the youngest to win a World Series game, and he tied Randy Johnson’s record of five wins in a single postseason set just the year before.14 His postseason success catapulted him to fame in Venezuela. Upon his return to the country after the triumph over the Giants in the World Series, he found hundreds of fans and a swarm of photographers waiting for him at the airport. His Venezuelan winter league manager declared, “He’s a bigger name than the president (Hugo Chávez) right now.”15

Despite his postseason heroics and ascent to the top of the baseball world, Rodríguez entered the 2003 season still officially a rookie. On the eve of the 2003 season, he said, “I look forward to trying to prove I can do this season what I did then. I don’t feel like a rookie; I don’t feel like a veteran, I feel like a player.”16 The Sporting News reported that “at least one general manager, and some scouts, have quietly wondered if Rodríguez is strong enough to avoid arm problems, given his maximum-effort delivery and a tendency to throw across his body.”17

The start of the 2003 season did not serve as a continuation of the 2002 playoffs for Rodríguez. He allowed earned runs in three of his first four outings, and his ERA rested over 5.11 at the end of action on May 25, the result of a very mediocre 22 appearances. However, from that point forward, Rodríguez posted a 2.20 ERA over his final 42 games, cementing his role as the primary setup man for Percival. Finishing the 2003 season with a 3.03 ERA and more strikeouts (95) and fewer hits allowed (50) than innings pitched (86), K-Rod proved that he was no flash in the pan.

As good as Rodríguez was in 2003, he was markedly better in 2004. Entering the season as an established player with no questions about whether he could contribute for a full season, Rodríguez lowered his ERA more than a full run to 1.82 and increased his strikeout total by 28 in nearly the same number of innings as in 2003. Used in the closer’s role around Percival’s injuries, he also recorded 12 saves. Rodríguez was selected to his first All-Star Game, in which Yankees manager Joe Torre used him to get the final two outs of the eighth inning to set up Mariano Rivera for the ninth. At the end of the season, Rodríguez finished tied for fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting. (The winner was the Minnesota Twins’ Johan Santana.) The Angels returned to the playoffs but were swept by the Boston Red Sox in the American League Division Series.

After the 2004 season, with Rodríguez fully entrenched as a dominant late-inning presence and Troy Percival 35 years old and dealing with chronic injuries, the Angels were content to allow Percival to leave for the Detroit Tigers via free agency and move Rodríguez into the closer’s role. Thus began one of the most prolific four-year runs of any major-league relief pitcher.

From the time he ascended to the Angels closer role in 2005 until he left the team after the 2008 season, Rodríguez averaged 69 appearances, 60 games finished, and 48 saves per season, all while striking out nearly a third of the batters he faced. He made two more All-Star teams and had two more top-four finishes in the Cy Young Award balloting.

The crown jewel of Rodríguez’s run as the Angels closer was in 2008, when he set a single-season record with 62 saves, besting the previous mark of 57 established by Bobby Thigpen of the Chicago White Sox in 1990. The combination of Rodríguez’s durability, effectiveness, and the Angels team winning 100 games with a much narrower than expected run differential meant that Rodríguez had no shortage of close games to try to nail down. During this stretch the Angels averaged 94.5 wins per season and made the playoffs three times, but were unable to return to the World Series.

As Rodríguez had worked his way into the upper echelon of major-league relief pitchers, he also had developed a reputation as a fiery and demonstrative figure on the mound. “He’s a melange of pirouettes, fist pumps, and primordial screams,” a sportswriter observed in 2008. “Francisco Rodríguez is perhaps the most demonstrative pitcher in the majors, punctuating his strikeouts and saves with clenched fists and roars.”18 In an environment as staid and traditional as baseball, not everyone loved Rodríguez’s showiness. In 2009, Yankees reliever Brian Bruney referred to his celebrations as a “tired act,”19 a comment that led to a brief media war of words between the two and an on-field confrontation during batting practice before a game.

After the 2008 season, Rodríguez hit the free-agent market at the height of his powers. He was coming off a historic season and was just shy of his 27th birthday, younger than most players who reach free agency. He parlayed his situation into a three-year, $37 million contract with the New York Mets, a team coming off back-to-back late-season meltdowns due in large part to a faulty bullpen. After wearing jersey number 57 throughout his Angels tenure, he reversed the digits and took number 75 with the Mets, as multi-Cy Young Award-winning pitcher and fellow Venezuelan Johan Santana had taken the number 57 when he joined the team a year earlier.

Despite the high hopes and high expectations, the deal never worked out for either side. After averaging more than 90 wins for the three seasons before Rodríguez arrived, the Mets never reached the 80-win mark in the three seasons Rodríguez spent with them. Rodríguez pitched well but was not the same dominant force he had been in Anaheim. His highest save total with the Mets was 35, and his strikeout numbers declined even as his ERA increased. As the team struggled, employing a high-priced closer was especially unpleasant for the Mets, a franchise whose finances were destroyed not long after they signed Rodríguez following the revelations of the team’s exposure to losses in financier Bernie Madoff’s fraud.20

Perhaps an appropriate symbol of Rodríguez’s time with the Mets was a game at Yankee Stadium against the Mets crosstown rivals on June 12, 2009. The Mets led the Yankees 8-7 heading to the bottom of the ninth and Rodríguez was summoned from the bullpen to close the game out. The Mets were 31-27 and were four games behind the defending World Series champion Philadelphia Phillies. This was a game a big-money closer has to finish off for his new team. Rodríguez retired Brett Gardner for the first out before allowing a single to Derek Jeter. He then struck out Johnny Damon on a 3-and-2 pitch for the second out, as Jeter stole second base. The Mets intentionally walked Mark Teixeira, putting the potential winning run on base to face Alex Rodríguez, struggling in his return from offseason hip surgery that caused him to miss the first month of the season. Pitcher Rodríguez fell behind in the count, 3-and-1, but appeared to get out of trouble when A-Rod popped the pitch up behind Mets second baseman Luis Castillo. Castillo, who had won two Gold Gloves with the Florida Marlins, had the ball lined up for the game-ending catch. He dropped it. Jeter easily scored the tying run and Teixeira, running hard from first base, followed with the game-winning run. Francisco Rodríguez stood with both hands on his head, stunned at what he had just witnessed. From the moment Castillo dropped the popup to the end of the season, the Mets went 39-64, while the Yankees went on to win the World Series. The game was Rodríguez’s first blown save with the Mets.

Worse than any individual struggle or team performance during his time in New York were some of the nonbaseball headlines Rodríguez made. In August of 2010 he was arrested after he assaulted his girlfriend’s father following a game at Citi Field. The Mets suspended him for two games, but during the incident he suffered a torn ligament in the thumb on his pitching hand that required season-ending surgery. A few months later, Rodríguez was back in court for violating a protective order by sending dozens of text messages to his girlfriend, also the mother of two of his children. He pleaded guilty to attempted assault and disorderly conduct and was sentenced to a year of anger-management counseling.

In 2011, with the Mets out of the playoff race in mid-July Rodríguez was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers for two players to be named later. Milwaukee desperately needed bullpen help ahead of closer John Axford, and Rodríguez pitched to a 1.86 ERA in 31 appearances as Milwaukee captured the National League Central Division crown. Rodríguez returned to the postseason for the first time since his last season with the Angels in 2008. He allowed one run in five innings over five appearances, helping the Brewers defeat the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Division Series before falling to the eventual World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series.

A free agent again, Rodríguez re-signed with the Brewers for 2012, posting a 4.38 ERA in 78 games, again setting up for Axford. This was the first of four consecutive seasons (2012-2015) that Rodríguez re-signed with Milwaukee on one-year deals, an arrangement interrupted only by a deadline trade to the Baltimore Orioles in 2013. He regained his old closer’s role for the Brewers in 2014 and ’15, posting 44 and 38 saves respectively and earning a selection to the National League All-Star team in both seasons.

In September 2012 while with the Brewers, Rodríguez was arrested in Wisconsin on suspicion of domestic violence, this time for allegedly striking his 23-year-old girlfriend, the mother of one of his children, at their shared home. After the alleged victim and a member of the household staff who witnessed the incident returned to Venezuela without cooperating with the prosecutor, the charges were dropped in late November. In addition to the three children with the two women connected to his arrests, Rodríguez had at least three children with two women prior to his 2002 major-league debut, with two living in Phoenix and one in his hometown in Venezuela.21

Rodríguez’s run with the Brewers finally came to an end in the offseason between 2015 and 2016 when he was traded to the Detroit Tigers. He produced a solid 2016 season before an abysmal first half in 2017 in which he posted a 7.82 ERA. At 35 years old with declining strikeout ability, the Tigers released Rodríguez in late June, ending his major-league career. He was quickly signed and released by the Washington Nationals in the summer of 2017 and went to camp with the Philadelphia Phillies in the spring of 2018 but was released a week before the season began.

Hoping to continue his career, Rodríguez spent the 2018 season with the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League and 2019 with the Aceros de Monclova of the Mexican League. He pitched well enough while playing alongside a number of other former major leaguers hoping for one more bite at the big-league apple, but not well enough for a big-league team to sign him.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, Rodríguez told a Venezuelan journalist that he hoped to make a comeback to the major leagues that year at age 38. Despite his pitching background and the fluid and expanded rosters during 2020’s disjointed season, no team signed Rodríguez and his career was effectively over.

Rodríguez left the major leagues with a 52-53 record, 10.5 strikeouts per nine innings, and a 2.86 ERA in 948 games, all in relief. His 437 saves are fourth on the all-time list, behind only Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith, all Hall of Famers.

After 16 seasons in the major leagues, Rodríguez appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first time in 2023. He earned 10.8 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility, enough to remain on the ballot but far short of the 75 percent needed for election, and indeed even far short of Lee Smith’s lowest percentage of the vote (29.9 percent). While Rodríguez did pitch about 300 fewer career innings than Smith, he put up better marks in ERA, ERA+, WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched), strikeouts per nine innings, strikeout-to-walk ratio, and hits allowed per nine innings. He also far outshines Smith in the postseason, where Smith had an ERA over 8.00 in only four games.

Ultimately, Rodríguez will be remembered for the highs with the Angels in the 2002 postseason and his magical 2008 campaign, and conversely for all the ways his promise turned sour on and off the field after he left Anaheim. He’s hardly the only major-league baseball player with a complicated story.

Last revised: September 15, 2025

NOTES

1 The franchise was known as the Anaheim Angels from 1997 to 2004, the Los Angeles Angels from 2005 to 2015, and adopted the current Los Angeles Angels moniker beginning with the 2016 season.

2 Stephen Cannella, “Bienvenido, Nene Fran,” Sports Illustrated, November 18, 2002: 60-63.

3 T. Christian Miller, “His Rise Has Been as Fast as His Fastball,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 2002. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-oct-22-me-rodriguez22-story.html. Accessed December 4, 2023.

4 Cannella.

5 Cannella.

6 Different 2002 sources list the fee differently, either $3 or $7 per month. In any event, the fee was small, and Ravelo waived it because Rodríguez couldn’t afford to pay it. Different sources also describe the journey to the Ravelo academy differently, from a 60-minute bus ride to a 90-minute train ride. The point here is that the academy was not easy for Rodríguez to get to.

7 Cannella, “Bienvenido, Nene Fran.”

8 At 71, Rodríguez was ranked just ahead of Carl Crawford. Josh Hamilton and Josh Beckett were ranked number 1 and number 3, respectively.

9 Cannella.

10 As of the 2023 playoffs, to be eligible for inclusion on a postseason roster a player only had to be with an organization by September 1 of that year, not necessarily on the active major-league roster. Rosters had also expanded to 26 players.

11 Rob Neyer, “K-Rod Is Great, But He Really Shouldn’t Be Here,” ESPN.com, https://www.espn.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=neyer_rob&id=1449436. Accessed December 4, 2023.

12 Miller, “His Rise Has Been as Fast as His Fastball.”

13 Miller.

14 In the 2023 postseason, Nathan Eovaldi also won five games.

15 Cannella, “Bienvenido, Nene Fran.”

16 Stan McNeal, “Starting Over at the Top,” The Sporting News, March 31, 2003: 25.

17 McNeal.

18 Matt Hurst, “Angels’ Rodríguez Remains Unapologetic, Defiant,” Riverside (California) Press-Enterprise, June 6, 2008. https://www.seattlepi.com/sports/baseball/article/angels-rodriguez-remains-unapologetic-defiant-1275852.php. Accessed December 4, 2023.

19 Harold Friend, “Brian Bruney Blasts Francisco Rodríguez,” BleacherReport.com, https://bleacherreport.com/articles/198987-brian-bruney-blasts-francisco-Rodríguez. Accessed December 4, 2023.

20 In 2009 Madoff was convicted of defrauding investors of billions of dollars (prosecutors estimated $65 billion) and was sentenced to 150 years in federal prison. Nicholas Reimann, “Bernie Madoff Dies in Federal Prison at 82.” Forbes.com, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/04/14/bernie-madoff-dies-in-federal-prison-at-82/?sh=3c2712823fad. Accessed January 11, 2024.

21 Cannella, “Bienvenido, Nene Fran.”