A throwback style player finds a new lease on his baseball life in 2025.
On a humid Tuesday night at Comerica Park this week, a stunning comeback story, one of many for the rampaging Detroit Tigers that may come to define this season, reached a new peak as Javier Báez launched two home runs, including an 11th inning, three-run walkoff homer for the ages.
Coming on the heels of a two-run go-ahead shot by a very talented Boston Red Sox rookie in Kristian Campbell, the dagger from Báez sent the home crowd into a frenzy and continued what has already been a remarkable start to the season.
On Friday night in Toronto, a diving catch turned into a double play, and a solo shot to left from Báez helped propel the Tigers to a 30-15 record, best in all the major leagues. The long-time Cubs star shows no signs of slowing down. Meanwhile, the Tigers currently look like the clear favorites in the American League, and one of the best teams in baseball.
Dark days in Detroit
Less than a year ago, the 32-year-old Báez was undergoing season ending surgery to correct a hip labrum tear and the attendant back problems that had tanked his production in 2023 and saw him looking like his career might be over in 2024 after hitting just .184 with six home runs over 80 games. At the trade deadline, the Tigers acquired a young shortstop in Trey Sweeney who seized the role as Báez began his post-surgery rehabilitation, and it was from the end of the dugout where he watched a scrappy young team that didn’t know they weren’t supposed to do this storm the stretch drive to their first postseason appearance since 2014 and their first playoff series victory since 2013.
At this point, it could’ve been over for the former Chicago Cubs star. His tenure in Detroit was looking like a minor disaster for the franchise. He lost his position and perhaps part of his identity as one of the more talented middle infielders of the last 25 years. His body was showing the effects of a 10-year major league career played with complete abandon. A young team had gone on to its first taste of success in a decade, and Báez wasn’t part of it anymore.
Hot dog or throwback player?
The world changes and Major League Baseball has changed with it. In the decade, the game as played at the highest level has gone through a comprehensive overhaul in the way players are evaluated and coached. Skills that were once highly rated have faded in importance, and the impressions left by brilliant individual plays are much more balanced out by the numbers.
In what I’ll refer to as the highlight era, from the rise of ESPN in the 80’s until the “Moneyball” era began and serious number crunching became more common place, Báez would probably be thought of differently. His skill set in many ways has always defied sabermetric expectations, and a contingent has always predicted doom based on his peripherals statistics.
Báez rarely walks, he whiffs a lot, he strikes out a lot, and he’s always relied on doing plenty of damage to post his best seasons. Some of the special set of skills that make Báez such a thrilling player to watch, from his tagging ability to the elusive slides and chaotically effective baserunning, don’t really emerge from a Statcast page. And despite the continued spectacular defense at both second base and shortstop, he’s had stretches where he would make a great play one minute, and throw an easy grounder away the next.
As a result, there’s always been a contingent, myself included, insisting that Báez was bound to decline fairly rapidly in his 30’s. His free swinging ways and stylish, all-out aggression in all phases of the game made him a fun player to watch, but also drew criticism when he made an error or swung for the fences when a ball in play was all that was required. When he joined a scuffling would-be contender in the Mets at the 2021 deadline, Báez went off at the plate but not before catching a bunch of flak for chastising the crowd for booing after a tough loss with some boos of his own and then calling for more positivity from the fanbase.
So impressions were pretty mixed when Al Avila, having missed out on top target Carlos Correa, brought Báez to Detroit on a six-year, $140 million contract prior to the 2022 season. No one doubted his raw talent, but would he fit in with the talented young core the Tigers were trying to develop, and how long would his talent allow him to get away with a pretty suspect approach at the plate?
While Báez had a solid season in 2022, it was certainly underwhelming. Fans may remember that after Báez’s first season in Detroit, A.J. Hinch, doing things you can’t really imagine many other managers doing, travelled with his family for a vacation in Puerto Rico. The motivation was for Hinch to get to know Javy Báez at home in hopes of developing the comfort and trust we see between them now.
With Báez, it often sounded a lot like trying to tame a wild horse. Hinch repeatedly said with different variations that Javy needed to be Javy and let it rip at the plate, but that all they were trying to do was build a better two-strike approach and get him to put the ball in play when he didn’t have leverage in the count on his side.
Even as Báez struggled through the 2023 season and then a disastrous 2024 campaign, there were signs that Hinch and his coaches were getting through to him. While he still was never going to be a guy to walk much, his strikeout rates, which had peaked at 31.9 percent in 2020 and 33.6 percent in 2021, came down immediately with the Tigers and have remained much closer to league average over these four seasons in Detroit than at any time in his career.
The problem was that his power disappeared in 2023 and 2024, and as it appears now the issues were largely physical. For all the fuss about wild swings at sliders down and away, he’s always done a good bit of that and succeeded anyway. The problem in Detroit, was that his body was failing him and the ability to leverage his power in the air was nowhere to be seen. Báez hit 17 home runs in 2022, but those numbers slipped to nine in 2023 and just six in two-thirds of a season in 2024.
Entering the 2023-2024 offseason, the emphasis was on strengthening his core to help alleviate the hip and back pain he was dealing with. In retrospect, he probably should’ve just given in and gotten some medical intervention rather than playing in a constant state of rehabilitation and maintenance. Whatever they tried, it wasn’t enough and Báez was a disaster in 2024 and looked like he was soon to be out of the league.
For many fans, the end of his tenure as a Tiger couldn’t come soon enough. Any initial optimism that he could help a young team break out of a glacial rebuild cycle was long gone. That had been replaced by slim hopes that he could just be a solid contributor. By the time he finally had surgery to repair the right labrum in his hip last summer, the fanbase most expected that the Tigers front office would ultimately have to just eat the contract and move on.
For a former star, it was an ugly couple of years in an apparently unrecoverable tailspin of poor performance and what certainly looked from the outside like frustration turning to apathy. Tigers fans had never seen much of the magic that made El Mago such a beloved player for the Chicago Cubs. There was little reason to hope that they’d ever see it ever again.
Re-introducing Javier Báez
More than that, Detroit Tigers’ fans had never gotten to really know Javier Báez in the first place. He wasn’t our player. The Tigers didn’t draft and develop him. His history prior to the Cubs years was unknown. He came here as another team’s fan favorite and star. The Tigers were just the ones paying him for that performance and the investment quickly looked pretty terrible.
Long before he came to Detroit, long before he became a key part of breaking the Chicago Cubs curse and capturing their first World Series in over a century, Báez had already lived a life that could have been something out of a Greek tragedy, survived, and come through thriving.
Born in Puerto Rico, Báez’s father Angel Luis trained his three boys in the national pastime on an island where that is still the case from the time they could walk. A landscaper who worked long, hard hours, he always came home in the evenings to take his boys to the field for practice. Time away from work and school was spent drilling the skills that would eventually make Javy a star. As is so often the case, the younger brother trying to keep up with the older ones turned him into a precocious ballplayer. Left-handed in everything else, Báez became a good young right-handed hitter and began developing the spectacular glovework, reaction time, and hand-eye coordination that would eventually make him a star.
When baseball practice was over, they would return home to his mother and younger sister Noely, who was born with spina bifida. Báez and his two older brothers were Noely’s protectors, and she his biggest fan.
Inside the family circle, Noely was independent minded as well, wanting as little help as possible, telling MLB.com’s Carrie Muskat in 2013 that “When we’re home, we cannot touch her wheelchair. If we touch it, she’ll lock the wheels and say, ‘No don’t push me.’ She was set on doing things herself despite her medical condition.
“When I was a little kid and I didn’t understand her situation, yeah, I thought, ‘Wow, we have a handicapped sister,’ and it’s hard for my mom,” Javier said. “Once I started growing up and lived with her every day, I realized this is not hard for us. God gave us this miracle. That’s what she is, a miracle. She’s in our lives for a reason.”
That stubborn independence and resilience, combined with the family’s faith, made an enormous impression on the young ballplayer.
When Javy Báez was just ten years old, the first major loss hit the family when he found his father dead of a freak slip and fall accident in the shower.
“He was one of the most amazing dads,” Baez said. “He got home from work at 6 o’clock at night, and he’d get to the house and take us to the field almost every day. He was really important in our lives. He is a special person in our history.”
The family persevered through some hard years, and in 2005 were able to move to Florida to have access to better medical treatment for Noely’s condition, and to help the youngest of the boys achieve his dream of eventually playing major league baseball. Báez learned English on the fly in middle school, a process that took several years. In the meantime, he began to develop a minor local reputation as a baseball player. Still, even in high school at Arlington County Day School in Jacksonville, Florida, he wasn’t so much a stand out player early on as he was known as a quiet, independent thinker by ballplayer standards who was a fanatically hard worker on his game.
Until late in his high school career, it wasn’t certain that Báez would even be drafted until the later rounds. He was committed to a small college already when the Chicago Cubs made him the ninth overall pick in the 2011 amateur draft. He progressed well as a prep prospect, putting up great numbers in his first season of A-ball, and then going nuts with 37 home runs in 137 games between High-A and Double-A in 2013.
All along, it was Noely tracking his scores and sending him messages of encouragement even as complications from spina bifida grew worse. In 2012, she achieved a major goal of hers by getting her high school diploma, but from that point her struggles deepened. Javy struggled with depression as things got worse, and that combined with some injury issues led to a pretty disastrous major league debutin 2014. In 2015, Noely passed away at the age of 21, and a devastated Báez took an extended leave of absence and for a time felt like he didn’t want to play anymore.
The same locus in his life of faith, family, and baseball eventually won out, and a year later, with a tattoo of Noely now gracing his right shoulder, he finally started to put it together. One year later he was part of baseball history as the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series championship since 1908.
Comeback story of the year?
In Hinch’s post-game presser following the walkoff shot against the Red Sox, you could feel the joy he feels seeing Báez finally performing as he can. Rather than dwelling on the last two years, Hinch pointed to Báez as a shining example of the all-in commitment to winning as a team that he represents.
When Hinch asked Báez to move to center field, a position he’s never played in the major leagues, Javy’s didn’t take long to respond, “sure let’s do it.” That stands out from a veteran player with a ring and a past as an MVP candidate shortstop. It felt even more pointed in the context of beating the Red Sox, whose star third baseman Rafael Devers has felt jerked around by the lack of communication from the front office and has steadfastly refused to change positions to accommodate the ideal use of their roster. On the other hand, Báez also didn’t have a lot of choice based on the way the last two seasons had gone. He came into this season fighting for his career, and it’s showed.
Watching Javier Báez circle the bases on Tuesday night, his whole backstory was on my mind. For a man whose entire life has been centered on faith, family, and baseball, the last few years had to have been rough. For Báez, the baseball field has always been the place he feels most comfortable in expressing himself. Off of it, he remains a fairly quiet, private person. Without the ability to create on the baseball field, he could’ve simply played out the string or even retired without another word. This is not a business with forgiveness for poor performance. And somehow here we are in mid-May, and Báez is absolutely a candidate for Comeback Player of the Year.
Instead, it’s nice to think that Báez’s two young sons are finally getting a look at the side of Javier Báez that only Cubs fans have every really gotten to treasure. It’s pretty darned great for any fan of the Detroit Tigers as well. For Javier Báez, baseball is the central organizing principle of life, and however long it lasts, he’s found himself a new lease with a young team that looks primed to be a force this season.
Sometimes you can only be romantic about baseball.