Duarte Brings International Coaching Experience to Marauders

One day, Renny Duarte could be elevated to the position of pitching coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Spending a few minutes with Duarte prior to a Marauders’ home game is a treat. Confidence oozes from every sentence the Venezuelan speaks about the nuances of pitching. The experience he’s picked up around the globe on baseball makes him uniquely qualified to teach.

Duarte has pitched in Mexico, coached in the Colombian Winter League, played five years in the Los Angeles (then Anaheim) Angels’ minor league system, played Venezuelan winter ball, and from 2011 – 2012, he pitched in the Italian Baseball League. Few instructors have been gifted a global view of baseball like Duarte's.

“When I stopped playing, there was an opportunity for me in Spain as a coach,” Duarte told The Bradenton Times.com at LECOM Park. “I worked with Spain’s national team that was part of the World Baseball Classic in 2013.”

Having spent the past three seasons in Bradenton as the Florida Coast League Pirates’ pitching coach, Duarte feels a personal connection with some of the young throwers currently with the Marauders. Several of the pitchers Duarte has been working with for a couple of seasons. One of his main goals in working with his young staff is to convey that he cares about them as people and their budding careers.

“I don’t want the game to speed on them,” explains Duarte of his pupils. I ask for them to throw a strike within the first two pitches they throw. We work on fundamentals all the time.”

Once the Florida State League season concludes on September 7, Duarte will pack up and catch a flight home to Milan, Italy. Last month, Duarte’s wife, Valentina, and their son, Ricardo, 8, spent time visiting in Bradenton. One more trip is planned during the summer for the Duartes to enjoy family time together in Manatee County, before reuniting in Italy during the off-season.

First being exposed to baseball as a kid growing up in Maracaibo with the children of American oil company employees, Duarte was quickly hooked on the game. Signed by the Angels in 1996 as an 18-year-old, Durate has been a player or coach for the past 28 years.

Along with his European baseball assignments, Duarte has assisted with MLB programs geared toward introducing the game to many who may not have ever played an inning or swung a bat.

“One game in Spain, the home plate umpire pulled out a yellow card and warned a team,” said Duarte of Europeans mistakenly equating baseball rules with those of soccer.

All the stops along Duarte’s baseball journey seem almost impossible to comprehend, given that he began as a teenager in South America. Traveling by bus for hours in the Pioneer League, where he was based in Butte, Mont., working his way up through Double-A ball, and finally as high as Triple-A in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada with the then Angels’ club in the Pacific Coast League, Duarte’s career statistics don’t tell his complete pitching story.

What is important to take away when studying Duarte’s value to the Pirates’ development team is his hunger to teach. There always seems to be new twists that his career has taken that could be shared with his students. Anyone who can say they pitched for a club in Northwest Italy, in a city bordering France and Switzerland, and recently served as a pitching assistant in the Puerto Rican Winter League, only a fool wouldn’t want to be a sponge when around Duarte.

There’s too much knowledge of everything that is pitching for Duarte not to be elevated, sooner or later, to the MLB level. He will tell you how much he enjoys teaching young pitchers. But there comes a time in everyone’s career when they should have someone “blow their horn” for them and solicit a promotion.

What a wonderful pitching education Duarte offers to the Marauders this season. Hopefully, the folks in Pittsburgh are keeping close tabs on pitching in Bradenton. With Duarte, the organization has a real gem in its fold.