Lenny DiNardo

Lenny DiNardo’s baseball career has been diverse, highlighted by a World Series ring, two no-hitters, setting collegiate strikeout records, and playing in the World Baseball Classic twice. DiNardo’s time playing baseball spanned five years in the major leagues and 11 years including college, the minor leagues, the Dominican Republic Winter League, and in the Chinese Professional Baseball League. He has been a professional guitarist for over 20 years and has been an in-studio baseball analyst since 2017.

DiNardo, a left-handed pitcher born in Miami, Florida, was originally selected in the 10th round by the Boston Red Sox in the 1998 amateur draft but he did not sign. He attended Stetson University from 1999 to 2001 and was drafted by the New York Mets in the third round of the 2001 draft.1

DiNardo compiled a 10-18 record with a 5.36 ERA and 132 strikeouts in 94 games played for the Boston Red Sox, Oakland Athletics, and the Kansas City Royals. In his 10 years in the minor leagues, he had a 39-44 record with a 3.93 ERA and 655 strikeouts in 756 innings. Pitching for the Lamigo Monkeys in the Chinese Professional Baseball League in 2012, DiNardo had a 3-6 record with a 4.50 ERA. He also pitched for Italy in the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics.

Leonard Edward DiNardo was born in Miami on September 19, 1979, the second of six children of Michael DiNardo Sr. and Elizabeth DiNardo. His father was a mail carrier, and his mother was a teacher’s aide. In his high-school years he lived in Micanopy, in north central Florida, and attended Santa Fe High School in nearby Alachua. He dominated in his four years on the Santa Fe baseball team with a 33-8 record, including a no-hitter, and a 1.26 ERA. DiNardo was a four-year first-team All-Area and a first-team All-Stater in his junior and senior years. (He was a second-team All-Stater as a freshman and sophomore.) In his senior year, DiNardo was named a USA Today High School All-American and a member of the Florida State High School All-Star Game.2

Former Santa Fe High School baseball head coach Todd Gray saw DiNardo’s major-league potential as he began his high-school career. His pitch speed and velocity were already significantly faster and harder than that of his teammates and opponents.

 “Lenny was throwing 78-90 miles per hour as a sophomore,” Gray said. “He had high velocity and could already throw a number of different pitches, which is rare in high school. Lenny always succeeded in anything that he put his mind to. He had a natural mindset for success.”3

DiNardo was drafted in the 10th round by the Boston Red Sox, but chose to attend Stetson University and play under head coach Pete Dunn.4

Not signing with the Red Sox “was a tough call to make,” DiNardo said. “I was a huge fan of Roger Clemens and had his poster on my wall. I felt that I had a lot of growing up to do and I wanted to work on strengthening up my pitching and I chose a three-year path that made me stronger as a pitcher and a baseball player. Pete was a great coach to play for. He told me when I signed with the school that he will give me a shot to learn to pitch which I very much appreciated. Stetson had a great coaching staff. I was also strongly influenced by coaches Larry Jones (Hall of Famer Chipper Jones’s father) and Derek Johnson (in 2023, Cincinnati Reds Director of Pitching).”5

DiNardo added to the Stetson University baseball lineage with a historic season in his sophomore year, 2000. He won a school-record 16 games with one loss and a 1.90 ERA, and had a school-record 132 strikeouts in 132⅔ innings. In Stetson’s 9-5 victory over Auburn in the opening round of the NCAA Atlanta Regional, DiNardo pitched eight innings and gave up four runs on 10 hits. Stetson defeated Auburn 13-10 in their second meeting in the regional before being eliminated by Georgia Tech 21-1 and 16-11 in the next round.6

“In every level of baseball, you face the crème de la crème of hitters,” DiNardo said. “In college, I was now facing teams full of high-school All-Americans in every game. I really had to learn how to hit my spots as a pitcher. The season really rolled that year. Everything was clicking with my pitches; I am not a hard thrower, but I had to have my pitching command. When you stand on the mound and know that you will be able to get the hitters out, that goes a long way in winning ballgames. I really appreciated what Stetson did for me. They gave me a shot and made me into a good baseball player. They gave me every opportunity and put me in position to succeed as a baseball player.” 

In DiNardo’s three seasons at Stetson, he finished with a school record of 35 wins with 10 losses. He was named a Freshman All-American in 1999 and a Third Team All-American in 2001. DiNardo spent the summers of 1999 and 2000 with USA Baseball’s Collegiate National Team and had an 8-1 record with a 2.29 ERA. He was inducted into the Stetson University Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007.7

“He was the perfect Stetson player,” Dunn said. “We saw that he was a good player and fit the profile perfectly. Lenny was a tall left-hander with much velocity. He was outstanding and was a strike thrower. Lenny could strike out players with his eyes closed. He had a remarkable three-year career at Stetson. He was a role model and a team leader. The team looked up to him. He was everything a coach wanted on and off the field. Lenny was a great citizen, person, and player.”8

In the 2001 draft, the New York Mets selected DiNardo in the third round. That summer he made his professional debut with the Brooklyn Cyclones of the short-season New York-Penn League. He pitched in nine games and was 1-2 with a 2.00 ERA with 40 strikeouts in 36 innings pitched. The Cyclones finished first in the league’s Stedler Division with a 52-24 record. Because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the league championship series was canceled after Brooklyn won the first game. The Cyclones and the Williamsport Crosscutters were named co-champions. 

“Brooklyn was a great city to play in,” DiNardo said. “We were the first pro baseball team in that city since the Dodgers moved out in 1957. We were treated like celebrities and would play Pickle on our offdays with the local kids in the street. It was a lot of fun playing there.”

DiNardo said Brooklyn coaches Howard Johnson and Bob Ojeda both had major impacts on his development as a professional baseball player.

“I learned so much from both of them about the game,” DiNardo said. “Bob was ‘old school’ and hard-nosed and took me under his wing. He challenged us as rookies. Bobby wouldn’t call us by our real names until we played in a game. He called me ‘Jimmy New Guy’ until I got my feet wet. Bobby told me that playing in the big leagues required a strong mental makeup in order to succeed.”

In 2002 DiNardo was moved up to the Capital City Bombers (Columbia, South Carolina) of the Class-A South Atlantic League. He went 5-5 with a 4.35 ERA with 103 strikeouts in 101⅓ innings. DiNardo also got a major-league tutorial on diversifying his pitches when he took part in the Mets’ spring training, a time that also foreshadowed his future music career.

“Al Leiter had a very strong influence on my learning how to throw a cut fastball,” DiNardo said. “He was not a hard thrower but was a great pitcher. Al didn’t really talk about it much, but I kept my eyes open on how he threw it. What also helped me develop my cutter was when I started playing guitar that season. The finger movement of playing chords on a guitar is very similar to throwing a baseball, which also helped me with my pitching development.”

In 2003 DiNardo split time between the Port St. Lucie Mets of the High-A Florida State League and the Binghamton Mets of the Double-A Eastern League. He started the season with Binghamton, where he had a 1-3 record with a 3.60 ERA in 40 innings pitched. He was then sent down to Port St. Lucie, for whom he was 3-8 with a 2.01 ERA and 93 strikeouts in 85 innings.

After the 2003 season the Mets left DiNardo eligible for the Rule 5 draft, and the Red Sox drafted him. “My agent called me one morning and said I was a new member of the Boston Red Sox because of the Rule 5 Draft,” DiNardo said. “He then tried to explain to me the rules on how to stay with the team. It was a lot to take in and I tried to just stay focused as a ballplayer and try to compete the best that I could.”

DiNardo started the season on the disabled list with a left shoulder strain, but made his major-league debut on April 23, 2004, against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium. DiNardo pitched a shutout ninth inning in the Red Sox’ 11-2 victory, striking out Hideki Matsui between groundouts by Gary Sheffield and Bernie Williams.

“My first game pitching at Yankee Stadium was an incredible experience,” DiNardo recalled. “It was a very difficult and hostile environment to be a Red Sox player pitching against the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. The fans were brutal when I was in the bullpen, and I tuned them out when I was pitching. I told myself before I pitched that the field was the same dimensions that I pitched in high school and the only difference was that there were thousands of fans in the stadium. I trusted my game and pitched my best. I had to face Sheffield, Matsui, and Bernie Williams in the ninth inning. It all worked out for me as I was able to get them out and we won the ballgame.” 

On May 1 DiNardo worked three shutout innings of relief in a loss to Texas. He did not give up a run until his fifth appearance. In all, he made 22 relief appearances during the regular season with neither a win, loss, nor save.

“I really approached the season with my eyes wide open and my mouth shut,” DiNardo said. “I wanted to soak it all in and learn from the best. This was an incredibly talented team that almost made the World Series a year before. The team had a great new manager under Terry Francona, and I learned so much from Pedro Martínez, Alan Embree, Mike Timlin, and Keith Foulke.  Bronson Arroyo, Bill Mueller, and Gabe Kapler were also very supportive of me. Bronson told me that I belonged here and to just throw like I knew how and trust my pitches. It was an incredible feeling to be a Boston Red Sox player at the time when they finally won a World Series after 86 years. The fans were so loyal, loud, and passionate. Talk about being at the right place at the right time.”

DiNardo’s last appearance for the 2004 Red Sox came on July 4, 1⅔ scoreless innings in Atlanta. A blister on a finger of his pitching hand and a pulled back muscle required weeks on the disabled list and extensive rehab. Only at the end of the season was he able to return, with brief stints for Boston’s minor-league affiliates in Sarasota, Portland, and Pawtucket, a total of five games and 11⅔ innings. With Pedro Astacio and Byun-Hyung Kim, he worked out in Fort Myers during the postseason, in case the Red Sox needed an emergency replacement.9 He worked out with the team in Boston during the World Series but was not on the roster.

DiNardo split the 2005 season between Boston and Triple-A Pawtucket. He bounced back and forth between the teams five times during the season. For Pawtucket, DiNardo posted a 6-3 record with a 3.15 ERA with 93 strikeouts in 108⅔ innings. For Boston, he was 0-1 in eight games (one start) with a 1.84 ERA.

Before the 2006 season started, DiNardo competed in the 2006 World Baseball Classic as a member of Team Italy. (A great-grandfather was of Italian descent.) The team also had future Hall of Famer Mike Piazza. Italy finished with a 1-2 record in the tournament, with DiNardo taking both losses.

“It was a great experience to play for Team Italy in the World Baseball Classic,” DiNardo said. “I loved the experience and appreciated what my great-grandfather did there. I got to play with Mike Piazza, Mike Gallo, and Jason Grilli on the team. Mike is a baseball Hall of a Famer and a consummate professional, but he is a very humble and a nice guy. He is very funny, and we would say lines from The Godfather to each other and crack each other up. The Italian kids loved us and would come into the dugout to see Piazza. Tommy Lasorda was Piazza’s godfather and gave the team a great emotional and fiery pep talk which really fired the team before a game.”

On May 7, 2006, DiNardo earned his first major-league win with a 10-3 victory over the Baltimore Orioles in Fenway Park. He pitched five innings and gave up one earned run on two hits. DiNardo walked five batters and struck out five. 

“I felt like that I pitched a lot of games against the Baltimore Orioles,” DiNardo said. “The first win was good, and it was a good feeling to get my first MLB win under my belt.”

DiNardo was hampered by a bulging disk injury suffered when he was rear-ended in a car accident, one that lingered throughout the 2006 season. It limited him to 13 games and six starts for the Red Sox and a 1-2 record with a 7.85 ERA. DiNardo also spent time with Pawtucket, Portland, and the GCL Red Sox in the Gulf Coast League.

“It was a tough season,” DiNardo said. On May 24, 2006, on the way to the ballpark, he was in an automobile accident. “I was in traffic and saw a car speeding up behind me. I braced for the impact, but I still ended up with a bulging desk. I had an epidural and the season was up and down for me as I dealt with the injury, but I was better in 2007.” 

In the offseason and as a Red Sox player, DiNardo became an active guitarist and backup singer and participated in the annual Hot Stove Music Concert in Boston for many years. He performed with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield of Blake Babies, Kay Hanley and Stacy Jones of Letters to Cleo, Bill Janowitz of Buffalo Tom, and Joe Keefe and Sebastian Keefe of Family of the Year.10

In the studio, DiNardo sang backup vocals with Red Sox teammates Johnny Damon and Bronson Arroyo on the Dropkick Murphys’ 2004 musical hit “Tessie.” DiNardo also supplied backup vocals to Arroyo’s debut music album, Covering the Bases, and played rhythm guitar on baseball journalist Peter Gammons’ song “Model Citizen” on Gammons’ debut album for Rounder Records, Never Slow Down, Never Grow Old.11 

“I started playing guitar when I was in my early 20s, so it is surreal to have played in front of thousands of fans for good causes with all these legendary musicians,” DiNardo said. “I was taught as a baseball player not to look into the crowd because it will distract you. I do the same as a musician. It is great to hear the cheering and the support from the fans, but I have to stay focused on hitting my chords. If I focus too much on the crowd, I will be distracted and miss my chords when I am playing.”

Though he was an active musician, DiNardo continued playing baseball. At the end of the 2006 season, he appeared in 10 games for the Peoria Javelinas of the Arizona Fall League in order to prepare for the 2007 MLB season.

“I needed the work and faced a lot of great and elite hitters in the league,” DiNardo said. “I was one of the older guys in the league, but the experience pitching there really helped me as a player.”

On February 14, 2007, the Oakland Athletics selected DiNardo off waivers from the Red Sox. He had two productive seasons for Oakland. DiNardo compiled an 8-10 record with a 4.11 ERA in 35 games. He was versatile for the A’s, with 20 starts and 15 relief appearances. June 10, 2007, was a historic day for DiNardo. In Oakland’s 2-0 win over the San Francisco Giants, he got his only major-league base hit, a single off Matt Cain. DiNardo pitched six shutout innings in the game but got a no-decision. 

In 2008 DiNardo split time with Oakland and Sacramento of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. He started the season with Sacramento where he had a 6-5 record with a 6.69 ERA in 15 games. DiNardo finished the season with Oakland, where he compiled a 1-2 record with a 7.43 ERA in 11 games.

“I had 20 starts and 15 relief experiences with Oakland,” DiNardo said. “It was a lot different than pitching in Boston. The Oakland-Alameda Coliseum is massive at 80,000 seats compared to Fenway Park; they draw 20,000 fans but it feels like 5,000. There weren’t as many Oakland fans as Boston fans, but they were just as loud, passionate, and supportive. I got a lot of pitching experience and pitched in and was put in a lot of different game situations. I appreciated getting those different opportunities as a pitcher.”

DiNardo signed a minor-league contract with the Kansas City Royals organization on December 20, 2008. Before he pitched for the Royals organization in 2009, DiNardo took part in his second World Baseball Classic for Team Italy. The team finished with a 1-2 record highlighted by a 6-2 upset win over Canada, but was eliminated by 7-0 and 10-1 losses to Venezuela. After playing in the WBC, DiNardo started the 2009 season with the Triple-A Omaha Royals. After going 10-5/ 3.32, DiNardo was called up to Kansas City and closed out his major-league career with an 0-3 record in five games.  

“Kansas City was a nice place to play,” DiNardo said. “I was pitching for a lot of different teams by the end of my career. I got to play in different countries around the world.” 

DiNardo tried to extend his major-league career when he signed a minor-league contract with Oakland on January 7, 2010. He began the 2010 season with Sacramento and posted a 2-5 record with a 3.40 ERA in 10 games. DiNardo also pitched in two games for the Athletics of the rookie Arizona League. 

The 2011 season continued in the minor leagues for DiNardo. He was 3-5/6.49 for Sacramento and 1-2/3.51 for the Midland Rockhounds of the Double-A Texas League. Released by Oakland, he joined the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, where he was 2-1 in three games. DiNardo ended the 2011 season with the Gigantes del Cibao of the Dominican Winter League. (3-5/2.22).

The year 2012 was an international season for DiNardo. He began the year in Taiwan, pitching for the Lamigo Monkeys in the Chinese Professional Baseball League, where he was 3-6 with a 4.50 ERA. Later DiNardo returned for another season with the Gigantes del Cibao. He was 0-0/ 38.57 in four games.

“I really enjoyed playing baseball in Taiwan,” DiNardo said. “It was a great place to play baseball. There was lots of talent there. They did a lot of bunting in different types of situations in the game. I liked pitching there, but my lower back was giving me lots of problems.”

After 12 years, DiNardo played his last professional baseball season in 2013. “I decided if I didn’t get any MLB interest after the season, I would retire,” DiNardo said. Again pitching in independent ball, he worked for the Atlantic League’s Lancaster Barnstormers. He made franchise history on May 8, 2013, when he threw the team’s first-ever no-hitter, a 9-0 win against the Long Island Ducks. DiNardo faced 28 batters, walked two, struck out eight, and recorded 15 outs on groundballs.12

“It was my second overall no-hitter in my baseball career. I threw one in high school. It felt really great throwing a no-hitter for Lancaster. Long Island was a very tough team made up of lots of former MLB and Triple-A players. I had a lot of support from my team on both the offense and the defense. They played very well. I was happy to throw the no-hitter in front of my wife [Julie] and oldest daughter. I thought that after I threw the no-hitter, I would hear from a MLB team but I did not hear from a single team and I knew my MLB career was over.”

DiNardo finished the 2013 season and his professional career with a 5-9 record and a 5.25 ERA. He retired in August.

“I really enjoyed playing baseball,” DiNardo said. “I felt that I got the most out of my pitching career and I worked hard and competed in every game that I played in.”

DiNardo worked as a pitching instructor in Fort Myers and Naples, Florida, and in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, where he and his family live. In April 2017 he became an in-studio analyst for the Red Sox’ flagship television station, the New England Sports Network (NESN).13 Besides his TV duties, he has been a licensed realtor since 2017.14

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the MLB.com, Baseball-Almanac.com, and StatsCrew.com websites for box score, player, team, and season pages, pitching and batting logs, and other material.

Notes

1 Lenny DiNardo Hall of Fame. Stetson University Athletics. https://gohatters.com/honors/hall-of-fame/lenny-dinardo/44.

2 Email correspondence from Ricky Hazel, Stetson University associate director for athletics for communications, licensing and branding, Stetson University Athletics, May 16, 2022.  

3 Author interview with Todd Gray, May 17, 2022.

4 In his 37-year coaching career, Dunn’s teams won 1,312 games and made 17 NCAA Regional Tournament appearances. Sixty-two of his team members played professional baseball, and seven of them made it to the major leagues.

5 Author interview with Lenny DiNardo, May 17, 2023. Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotations from Lenny DiNardo derive from this interview.

6 Hazel. 

7 Hazel.

8 Author interview with Pete Dunn, May 24, 2022.

9 Bob Hohler, “Pesky Happy to be Back,” Boston Globe, October 23, 2004: 61.

10 Lenny DiNardo Songs, allmusic.com. https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lenny-dinardo-mn0000385539.

11 Jim Sullivan, “Jocks and Rock – “Hot Stove Cool Music” Benefit Concert Comes back to Boston.” WBUR News, April 25, 2017: 19. https://www.wbur.org/news/2017/04/25/hot-stove-cool-music-boston.

12 Burt Wilson, “Barnstormers’ DiNardo Spins No-Hitter vs Long Island,” LancasterOnline, May 9, 2013. https://lancasteronline.com/sports/barnstormers-dinardo-spins-no-hitter-vs-long-island/article_4cfbad11-991e-5ada-b2bb-e4f9ccc87dc7.html.

13 “NESN Announces Booth Talent for 2022 Red Sox Season,” NESN.com, March 15, 2022. https://nesn.com/2022/03/nesn-announces-talent-roster-for-2022-red-sox-season/#:~:text=Jahmai%20Webster%20will%20serve%20as,to%20the%20roster%20Will%20Middlebrooks.

¹⁴ Peyton Doyle, “Lenny DiNardo: From Pitching Strikes to Pitching Homes,” boston.com, March 23, 2023. https://www.boston.com/real-estate/real-estate/2023/03/31/lenny-dinardo-red-sox-pitcher-turned-realtor-broadcaster/.