ACL Guardians 4, ACL Athletics 0
Guardians improve to 5-2
The MiLB website doesn’t include Arizona Complex League games when you select all game results by affiliate, so I had no idea the league had quietly kicked off its season a week ago, but the ACL Guardians season is off to a strong start.
Monday’s game saw the pro debut of Cleveland’s 2025 second round competitive balance pick Will Hynes, a high school pitcher out of Mississauga, Canada.
Hynes, who is 18 years old, impressed, tossing 3.0 shutout innings with three strikeouts, two hits allowed and one
walk.
His piggyback partner was Ryan DeSanto, a 12th round pick out of Penn State in the 2025 draft. DeSanto finished off the seven-inning game with 4.0 additional shutout frames of literal perfect baseball while striking out seven. It was an absolutely dynamite performance, but he also is four years older than Hynes.
On offense, the ACL Guardians took advantage of three errors to score four runs despite collecting just three hits. They also walked five times and stole a whopping seven bases.
A rehabbing Welbyn Francisca walked twice and stole two bases.
So far, the most impressive young hitter for the ACL Guardians has been 18-year-old shortstop Ricardo Romero, who stands 5-foot-5. Romero went 2-for-3 with a double and a stolen base, also knocking in a pair of runs. Through seven games thus far, he’s batting a ridiculous .619 with two doubles, two triples and has as many walks (four) as strikeouts om 25 plate appearances.
He won ACL Player of the Week during the ACL’s first week of the season and doesn’t look like he’s slowing down anytime soon. He put up impressive .312/.415/.476 splits over 46 games in the Dominican Summer League last year as a 17-year-old, where he was a midseason All-Star.
