The Show Notes #17: The Fernando Rodney Experience Is Everlasting

Samaná-American Fernando Rodney's longevity, vibrant personality, and unique background make him one of the most important Black relief pitchers of Major League Baseball's Integration Era

Author’s Note

This article is one of the first to be published under the umbrella of my official partnership with Black Baseball Mixtape. At least four articles will be published per month on all topics that are relevant to Black Baseball Culture, including the moments that reveal themselves as the 2025 MLB season transpires. I will have more opportunities to interview Black players, scouts, coaches, etc. than ever before in my brief career.

My main goal is to publish stories that push the envelope and highlight the entire African diaspora’s past, present, and future relationship with baseball on a collective level. Thank you all for reading and subscribing; I would not have reached this point without the collective support from my audience and my peers. - Pat Ellington Jr.

Introduction

There are just three pitchers in Major League Baseball history who have recorded at least one save with nine different teams. Additionally, there are only 53 pitchers who have successfully converted at least 200 saves, and among them, only 31 have reached the milestone of 300 saves. Since the start of the Wild Card Era in 1995, only 10 relievers have pitched at least 900 total career innings. The only individual to achieve these milestones is Fernando Rodney, who boasts one of the most unique careers of any relief pitcher during The Integration Era.

Rodney belongs to an ethnic enclave known as Samaná-Americans, descendants of a group of African-American families from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area who immigrated to the island of Hispaniola during the mid-1820s while it was still entirely under the authority of Haiti after being emancipated from slavery. Most of these individuals congregated on the Samaná Peninsula, located in the northeastern sector of the island in the present-day Dominican Republic.

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, the American government established multiple deportation programs to send emancipated individuals of African descent in the United States to the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa. The Samaná-American ethnic group makes up the largest English-speaking population on the island of Hispaniola, and it is one of the five largest ethnic enclaves of Anglophone Black people in Latin America. Its creole/patois is a mixture of Spanish and Ebonics known as Samaná English. There are approximately 10,000 Samaná English speakers and half a million total Samaná-Americans in the Dominican Republic currently.

Rodney was selected to three All-Star teams and recorded seven seasons with at least 30 saves. He reached the forty-save plateau twice and is 19th all-time in career saves with 327. His 951 appearances on the mound is the 20th all-time, and he is one of 47 relief pitchers with at least 900 career strikeouts. Rodney was the last MLB player born in the 1970s to appear in a game, which encapsulates his persistence.

Rodney is known for sporting a baseball cap with the bill pointed slightly towards the left and his tradition of firing off an imaginary bow and arrow after successfully closing out a game. He tilts his cap as a way to pay homage to his late father, who succumbed to cancer a week before his MLB debut. The bow and arrow gesture is a reference to the place where he was raised, a small village in the Samaná Bay known as “La Flecha.”

As a child, he learned the tricks and trade of a Dominican fisherman under the tutelage of his father, Ulises Benjamin, with whom he had a close relationship. The younger Rodney developed the trademark jokester personality that has made him beloved in every clubhouse he’s gotten dressed in while handling nets and lines on the sea with his father. Growing up, his preferred sport was boxing, even though he always showed promise as a baseball player.

"That's what all the guys do (at that age in Santo Domingo) -- boxing, karate, taekwondo. But my dad told me, 'I don't like boxing for you. I don't like that sport. Keep working on practicing baseball.' And I listened to my dad." - Fernando Rodney