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Welcome to the second installment of “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I dive deep on some of the prospects whose performance has most surprised me this season.

He had me at “Italian.”

At the outset of the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to join along as she learned Italian. After months of resistance, I finally caved. The first word I learned was ragazzo, which means “boy.” The plural form (ragazzi) came not long after, at which point I was able to translate the name of the pizza joint I’d often stumbled into at 3 AM back in college. All of 90 seconds into studying, I was hooked. I quickly exhausted a couple of online courses and soon, in a sort of modern day, language-themed pen pal arrangement, I connected with a few Italians online, which improved my language skills dramatically. This will be my last article here before I take a two week trip to Italy to see those friends. As far as I know, I don’t have a hint of Italian heritage, but that hasn’t prevented me from becoming a proud Italophile.

So, when an Angels source sidled up next to me on the backfields a few months ago and started talking excitedly about a Milanese lefty they’d signed out of indy ball, I stopped paying attention before he got to the part about the upper-90s fastball and wipeout slider.

“So he’s really from, like, Italy, Italy? Was he on their WBC team? How’s his English?”

Calmati, Brendan.

Nicolo Pinazzi is a 26-year-old lefty working out of Double-A Rocket City’s bullpen. While the Milan native grew up around the game — his father played in a semi-professional Italian league — Pinazzi never thought seriously about turning pro when he was a kid. As a gift, his family flew him to Arizona for a baseball showcase after he finished high school, which he saw as a fun opportunity to see a new country and play a little ball.

There, Pinazzi quickly realized two things. The first was that the hitters were much better than the guys he’d mowed down in Italy. The second was that he was quite good as well. He discovered that his fastball was sitting in the low-90s and, perhaps not surprisingly, the college and professional offers rolled in almost immediately. At this point, it dawned on Pinazzi that baseball might just change his life. Sorting out the next step was a little tricky — “I didn’t know anything about the schools, a D-III and ASU were basically the same to me,” he said when I spoke to him last month — but he committed to JUCO powerhouse Northwest Florida State and eventually found his way to the Cincinnati Reds organization in August of 2020.

With Cincy, Pinazzi turned into a capable, if wild, pitcher. He was fairly effective on the Arizona complex, and worked in and out of the rotation there for the better part of three years. He reached Low-A for a couple stints in 2023 but was released after walking 26 hitters in 18.1 innings with Daytona.

From there, he bounced around, on the field and off. He made indy ball stops in Gary, Indiana, Kansas City, and Idaho Falls. He had a spell at Tread Athletics, went back home to work out in a gym with his cousins in Italy, and then spent time with Kinetic Pitching Performance. It was in the midst of working out at his cousins’ facility and honing his craft at Kinetic that everything clicked. He found a way to harness his funky delivery and get himself more online to the plate. Alongside, his fastball’s velocity climbed a few ticks, which helped turn his promising breaking ball into an absolute hammer. Pinazzi calls it a cutter — sort of. “I say cutter, but it’s definitely a slider,” he told me. “I say cutter to delude myself, I throw more strikes that way.”

Though he was again a little scattered in 2025 back with Idaho Falls, Pinazzi’s stuff was unmistakably crisp. It attracted the attention of a few scouts and convinced the Angels to take a chance on the lefty with interesting traits but a limited track record.

They’re glad they did. Low-A relievers are very rarely prospects, and the ones who are generally aren’t the oldest guy on the team. But there’s nothing typical about Pinazzi, nor the results he soon generated. In 29.1 innings, he posted a 1.53 ERA with 48 strikeouts. The Angels promoted him to Tri-City earlier this summer, where he again eviscerated the competition: He struck out 29 hitters in 16 innings and didn’t surrender an earned run. He was only there for a couple months before the Angels bumped him again, this time to Rocket City, and he’s off to a good start there as well. If anything, these numbers aren’t doing him justice. Among minor league pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched, Pinazzi’s 0.90 ERA is the very best in baseball. He’s also struck out 39.6% of opponents this year, which ranks fifth in the minors. He’s in pretty good company:

Pinazzi isn’t doing all of this with smoke and mirrors, either: He’s got real stuff. His fastball sits 93-96, and while the shape isn’t special, it’s a sneak attack pitch, not the foundation of his arsenal. He’s a slider, err, cutter monster, and he throws his power breaking ball about 60% of the time. It has plus spin, and long and slurvy break, and he generates a little bit of extra movement by decreasing his extension on the pitch:

He’s also got a curve, which has a similar shape, but is longer and not quite as firm.

Minor league hitters have been overwhelmed. Even with heavy usage, Pinazzi has notched a 46% called and swinging strike rate (which is elite) on his cutter. He can land it in the zone and entice chase, and while he’s not a marksman, Pinazzi’s Gumbyish delivery may just enhance his deception more than it limits his command. And in any case, the 26-year-old has found a way to throw more strikes than he did in his first spin through affiliated ball. The most improbable of farmhands is now a legitimate pitching prospect. Below, you can see how the stuff all grades out:

What’s especially exciting here is that Pinazzi has a chance to blossom into a big leaguer right on the heels of what is arguably Italy’s most exciting baseball moment ever. The Italian national team was a semifinalist in the WBC this past spring, and while the club was mostly composed of Italian Americans (Pinazzi himself was on the squad in 2023, but wanted to focus on his opportunity with the Angels this time around), the team’s performance broke containment half a world away. The team received plenty of domestic media coverage. As just one tiny example, the hosts of a popular Italian soccer podcast opened one episode by bantering about the WBC, and one mused that baseball was his favorite American sport. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni congratulated the squad in a parliamentary speech, and from his vantage point, Pinazzi sees increased interest at the atomic level. He noticed far more baseball conversation on social media and among his friends during this past WBC compared to previous editions. “It’s an odd sport, the rules, how it works. It’s as strange as it is fascinating,” he said. “But it was breaking the barrier a little bit.”

When I asked Pinazzi what would help grow the game further, he had a simple answer: infrastructure. Not only fields, which are understandably hard to find in a fairly densely populated country where baseball isn’t a major sport, but also just in general training facilities. “For me, the offseasons are complicated. I throw indoors at a high school. I’m in Milan, one of the biggest cities and I can’t find [sport-specific] training facilities,” he told me.

Improving that will be a long-term challenge. But if there’s a will, a way tends to follow, and in the meantime, Pinazzi has a chance to help inspire a generation of prospective baseball players. Along with another Angel, Sam Aldegheri, he’s trying to become the second Italian player in the major leagues. Time will tell, but Pinazzi’s chances to do so are starting to look pretty good.