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With his 4-homer game on Tuesday, Baez since April 20th (exactly 200 PA’s):
.310/.365/.717
But here’s the catch. The plate discipline is marginal again, just like prior to his breakthrough 2025 campaign. Just 13 walks and 64 strikeouts, even during this incredible extended hot streak.
He has 1 walk and 15 Ks in June. It’s one of those times where his batting average is higher than his OBP: .412/.400/.912. He’s definitely swinging a hot bat, but his plate discipline does need some refining.
This morning Baez’s season stat line reads 87 Ks in 62 games. Yikes. His K rate jumped from 20% to 30% from one year to the next. I wonder what is going on with him.
Maybe I’m putting too much faith in the new regime, but I’m imagining that he’s working on things with the coaching staff often and even if he’s tapped into the power, there’s probably an adjustment to help him make a little better contact. Of course, being at AAA vs AA means the pitchers have better command and stuff in general, which probably plays a part.
Bottom line, I think he’s athletic enough to be fine in the long term, even if he likely won’t be the superstar that his power portends at the minor league level. I’d be very happy if Baez is a little above average, 110-120 OPS+ type hitter (lower BA, higher SLG) with above average LF defense. Once Noot moves on, I certainly don’t want to go back to Nathan Church in LF. A home grown, 2-3 WAR LF with Walker looking good in RF and hopefully something useful in CF sounds a lot better than what we had the first two months this year. If somehow Baez makes the adjustments to drop the K rate and keep the power, then having two Walker-level hitters at the OF corners would be a nice surprise and a great help to the team effort.
Baez has easy 70 grade game power. But I do want them to keep him in AAA longer to work on his plate discipline and contact. He has a swinging strike rate of 17.3% and his zone contact % is 78.2%. With his power, he can run worse numbers for those but I want to see him swing less out of the zone and when he swings make more contact. The BB% dropping shows he has changed his approach from last year and he doesn’t have to have an elite walk rate, but he needs to up it some.
It does look like the new player development org is much more tolerant of strikeouts than the previous leadership. Power production is up, but so our strikeouts. It looks to be part of the new organizational philosophy.
In 2019 Memphis had an OF hit 32 HR’s and struck out 159 times. The Cardinals ended up selling him a few months later for cash considerations. Hopefully things end up better for Baez than they did Adolis Garcia.
Garcia was a bit older than Baez when he climbed all those homers. That said, if the Cards got a near 4 WAR player for a few years out of Baez, that would be a pretty positive outcome.
When Garcia first signed with the Cardinals, he was older than Baez is today. But, clearly both took time to become MLB-ready.
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