Mark Whicker: Here come the Tigers on rivalry weekend, with Javy Baez coming back
CF Javy Baez is in the running for AL Comeback Player of the Year with the first over-all Detroit Tigers.
May 15, 2025
By Mark Whicker
Canadian Baseball Network
A rising tide lifts all boats, including the rusted careers which lie at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
Look at the lineup card of the Detroit Tigers this weekend at Rogers Centre -- rivalry weekend going back to 1987 -- and you’re likely to see Javier Baez playing centre field and hitting ninth.
That would have been inconceivable in 2016, when he helped drive the Cubs to a World Series title, or in 2018, when he led the National League with 111 RBIs and was second in MVP voting. It would be like Lady Gaga playing the Rodeway Inn lounge in Farmington Hills.
Yet it represented progress, a return trip from the oblivion of 2024. Baez is 32. He is hitting .309 at this writing, which would be a career high. On May 13 Baez whacked two home runs, the second of which beat the Red Sox in the 11th inning. His OPS jumped nearly 100 points, to .842, in the first half of May.
He is serving the fourth year of a six-year contract that would have gotten any motor company executive fired. Baez is making $25 million this year for the team with baseball’s 17th-highest payroll. The total deal pays him $140 million, and last year he hit .184 with 18 extra-base hits.
He lost whatever hold he had on shortstop when the Tigers got Trey Sweeney from the Dodgers for pitcher Jack Flaherty, whom they re-signed as a free agent this winter. When you don’t produce, you never dispel the ghosts, like the times Baez would get doubled up because he forgot the outs, or the times he took a gradual approach to the basic 90 feet.
But if this Baez is anywhere close to the one in the previous decade, when he was one of the most dynamic young players in the game, the Tigers will write those checks with eyes wide open. They also could be headed to a World Series.
Detroit has the best record in baseball (29-15). It’s not a shock because they won 86 games and a playoff series last year. They are 60-28 since last Aug. 10. High draft picks, like pitcher Casey Mize and slugger Spencer Torkelson, are healthy and thus pitching and slugging effectively. Their bottomless bullpen, with few roles pre-assigned, has a 1.14 WHIP, second to the Astros in the AL, and they’re second in runs scored and second in ERA.
Gleyber Torres, another ex-Cub who went to New York and got sent off to Motown, is hitting .289, and defending AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal leads the league in strikeouts. What is surprising is how competitive the American League Central is, and how superior it seems to the mighty East.
The Tigers will have to play at least this well to hold off Kansas City, Cleveland and Minnesota for the division championship. But it is the culmination of patient drafting by the front office and astute managing by A.J. Hinch. Having Baez play like this is similar to getting extra credit on your final.
Nobody wants to hear about injuries, especially those who are injured, but Baez kept trying to grit his way through hip pain until he consented to arthroscopic injury last August. He returned in the spring and was pleased to learn he could reach the sliders that he kept missing last year.
“I couldn’t transfer my weight last year,” Baez said. “It wasn’t letting me swing.”
But even now he was taking up space. The Tigers had committed to Sweeney at shortstop, and if they really needed versatility they had Zach McKinstry. When injuries brought down several Tiger outfielders, Baez volunteered to play centre.
“Here’s a guy who’s been through a lot in his time here,” Hinch said. “He continues to battle, continues to fight and to learn a new position. He’s all in. He should get all the praise for how he’s gone about it. The dude’s got a Gold Glove at shortstop and now he goes to centre. It’s priceless.”
“Centre field was always my favourite position,” Baez said. “Now people see me out there and I can say, ‘I told you.’’’
Baez’s career hit its first bump in September of 2019, when he suffered a hairline fracture of his thumb. He couldn’t play in the postseason. At the trade deadline in 2021 the Cubs were not sure they could, or wanted to, sign Baez, and thus shipped him to the Mets for current centre fielder Peter Crow-Armstrong. The Mets were leading the NL East by four games at the time and Baez contributed an .887 OPS in his two months. But they didn’t make the postseason, and the Tigers, hoping to short-circuit the process, came up with the money.
At one time, such riches seemed inevitable for Baez. He was only 23 during the Cubs’ season of deliverance, and he smoked 63 home runs in 2018-19. He developed a reputation as the game’s quickest tagger, on pickoffs and steal attempts alike, and yet he was as flashy in avoiding tags, using what former Cubs’ farm director Tim Wilken called “the swim move.”
Three times that year, umpires called Baez out on the bases, and replays deemed him safe. He was a prize, a young player with obvious gifts who already had mastered the wrapping paper, the details that win games.
“On a 20 to 80 scale he graded out in the 70s on everything you could measure,” said Wilken, the former Blue Jays and Cubs scouting director. “But his instincts were always off the charts.”
Baez also mixed in some good-natured exuberance, like his buddy Francisco Lindor who, like Baez, left Puerto Rico to play for top-notch high school teams in Florida. Lindor was the fifth pick in the 2011 draft (by Cleveland) and Baez the ninth.
When Baez swatted his game-winner against Boston, he paused for a moment and then raised his fists as Manny Ramirez used to do. “I tried to do the Manny,” he said. “I was just trying to push it out.”
Doing the Javy is, once again, good enough. Especially if it brings Baez the honour that neither he nor anyone else envisioned: Comeback Player of The Year.