THE REDBIRD REVIEW
The No. 1 question about Joshua Baez is basically a juicy hanging slider. It’s a meatball, right over the middle.
Hey everybody, swing away!
The question: when?
When does Baez get the call, telling him to report to St. Louis and join the Cardinals.
C’mon, tell us.
When?
Here are the choices:
1. Right here, right now. Don’t waste another minute. Or maybe you don’t want to see the home team hit home runs at Busch Stadium? Oh, you don’t wanna sell tickets? You must have liked those early-week crowds of 22,000 at Busch Stadium for the Arizona series.
2. Hold onto your britches, Sparky. Pipe down. Let Baez continue to work on his important project to cut his strikeout rate, his whiff-swing rate, his chase rate, his contact rate on strikes. Smooth out the rough edges.
3. If Chaim Bloom trades outfielder Lars Nootbaar … it’s … go time! Make the call to Baez, give him his travel information, and inform the terrific Cards equipment staff to get his Birds on the Bat uniform ready.
4. No, no, no. Let’s play it safe. It’s difficult to just pass up the chance to watch him swing at Busch Stadium, but it’s best for him to put in a full campaign at Memphis. Once exception: if there’s an injury to an outfielder and the Cardinals want to give Baez a one-month education on facing major-league pitchers, that would be OK.
5. Forget about Baez. Put him in a trade package for Tigers ace Tarik Skubal.
(That last one goes into the category of “Alex, I’ll take ‘What Crazy People Say,’ for $500.”)
You can make a case for any of these options … Well, everything except for using Baez as a trade chip. Hot take, no sale.
I do think there’s a Noot-Baez connection. If Noot is moved before the deadline, then it makes sense to plug Baez into left field and let him be the regular starter there.
I also think there’s a chance Baez will stay in Memphis for the duration. But to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t wager on any of these choices to be anything close to a certainty.
I also do not know how the contentious CBA negotiations between baseball’s owners and the players association – with an almost certain lockout and shutdown – is influencing the Cardinals’ thinking on this … if at all.
Baez is focused on refining his control of the strike zone and he’s making headway. I’ve written about, and listed, the examples of this a few times over the last two or three weeks.
But here’s what I keep thinking about. Young Baez has pure, concentrated power. No hype for me to say it’s incredible. In that context there is something to be said about putting his whiffs into perspective. And not freaking out over them.
The Cardinals surely realize this, because they successfully “fixed” Baez at Double A last season, saw how hard he worked on his plate discipline, and directly learned that this is a smart and determined player who completely buys into coaching. And Baez hungers to improve. He wants to be great. And he’ll put in the work to achieve that.
For example, his June strikeout rate is 24.4 percent, and that’s a significant reduction from 32.5 percent – over the first two months. He’s improved his contact rate on strikes by around 10 percent … which is a very encouraging sign.
This precocious young man – who turns 23 years old on Sunday – is the opposite of a conceited knucklehead who thinks he knows everything.
So is there an argument to be made here?
That maybe the Cardinals shouldn’t have too much anxiety over his weaknesses – and just embrace his strengths?
It is difficult to find – and have access – to this degree of power. I want to share a stat with you … and before I do that I can assure you that I understand the difference between minor-league pitching and major-league pitching.
That should not be understated. But I also understand that power of this magnitude is difficult to find and access.
So here’s a little something to look at.
Slugging percentage on contact, aka SLGCON. A hitter connects, puts the ball in play and if he’s got it … wow.
(An aside: I think I was bouncing around a mosh pit and getting my nose rearranged at a hardcore punk show in a vacated Baltimore furniture warehouse … yeah, I think the show was called SLGCON, or shoulda been called SLGCON … but for the love of Black Flag and Bad Brains, that was 40+ years ago, so …)
Anyway, when Baez puts the ball in play, does that ball howl louder than Allen Ginsberg when jolted by his bat? What’s the hard-hit rate? The exit velocity? Does he find the sweet spot when he decides to swing, intercept the pitch, and drive it into the sky at an elite-level launch angle?
I want to show you Baez’ SLGCON and compare it to that same metric powered by several of the top big-league sluggers.
SLGCON, 2026
Kyle Schwarber, .994
Josh Baez, .956
Munetaka Murakami, .933
Byron Buxton, .809
Aaron Judge, .803
Yordan Alvarez, .784
Shohei Ohtani, .766
Umm, uh, well …
— I’m not saying Baez is equal to, or better than, those MLB-certified power sources. I’m just saying that BIG power is big power … and ya either have it or ya don’t. And Baez could well be headed for the VIP section in the power club.
— Here’s another relevant metric: Isolated Power. (Widely known as ISO.) This distills power to its essence, and it’s easy to calculate: slugging percentage minus batting average.
As of Friday morning five MLB hitters had an ISO above .300, and I’ll drop Baez in there, based on his own ISO.
Josh Baez, .353
Schwarber, .338
Murakami, 320
Buxton, 315
Alvarez, .307
Ben Rice, .302
The Baez ISO was .253 in the opening month, .358 in May, and is a staggering, gosh dang rocketman .440 in June. Everybody get out of the bleachers and take cover!
— Baez continues to raise his hard-hit rate to an astronomical level. It was 51% in the first month, 52% in May, and now 60.3% in June.
C’mon. Ain’t fair to the pitchers.
If we go back to when his most recent home-run barrage began on May 26, his hard-hit rate is 62.5%.
Right now the MLB leader in hard-hit rate is James Wood at 60 percent.
This proves something: the 26 home runs walloped by Baez aren’t just a byproduct of slugging in hitter-friendly Triple A parks or getting cheapies on wind-blown fly balls.
Baez is consistently squaring up pitches with absolute violence and malice aforethought.
And his average exit velocity is tracking the same. It was 93.2 mph in April, 93.7 mph in May, and is 94.2 mph in June.
‘Tis yet another reason why Baez hit 20 home runs at Double A last season, but will soon reach 30 home runs at Triple A. He adjusted rather quickly.
In fact – and I looked this up – Baez has clouted 15 of his home runs this season against pitchers with major-league experience. Including Andrew Kittredge, Dietrich Enns, Jose Cuas, James Karinchak, Cade Povich, Junior Fernandez and Matt Pushard.
So … what does Sam Dykstra think?
Sam is one of the excellent prospect evaluators for MLB Pipeline. He joined Chris Rongey (and yours truly) on the KMOX Gashouse Gang Show on Thursday.
And we asked him about Baez: what the hitter needs to work on, what’s the timetable, and is he close to being ready?
Sam had a lot to say.
And I liked what he had to say.
“All those gains that he had last year in Double A in terms of being more direct to the ball, improving the contact, playing into his natural raw power, it's really continued at the minors' top level,” Dykstra said. “He is somebody who hadn't seen AAA pitching coming into this year, and he's really tackled it well and really improved as the season's gone on.
“Since May 12th, he's played 35 games, he's slugging .804 in that time. He has 19 homers in those 35 games. Nobody else in full season minor league baseball is slugging above .788 in that span.
“And you look at the raw data, the exit velocities are certainly there, he's hitting the ball hard a bunch, he's getting the ball in the air, he's gotten (many) barrels, which measures both quality of contact and directionality of contact. His barrels are the best in AAA among players with at least 200 plate appearances.
“He's ticking every box right now. I mean, yes, if they were to call him up tomorrow, he's probably going to strike out 30 to 35% of the time in the majors. But in terms of raw power and in-game power, it's tough to find his rival right now … with the Cardinals or basically anywhere in AAA.”
We asked Dykstra: when did he think Bloom would be comfortable about promoting Baez to the big club?
“I think we're kind of at that time now,” Dykstra said. “Just because he's not being challenged, right? … we’re kind of at the point where AAA isn't a challenge.
“And for somebody of his quality, he's going to need to see better pitching to really take that into account.
“Now, I will say, you can kind of live with the chase and the contact that he's showing right now if he's making as loud contact as he is. When he's putting the bat on ball, it's as loud as anybody in AAA right now.
“So, I think we're kind of in, I don't want to say it's a Goldilocks zone, because the best of all worlds is that he's making tons of contact and hitting for power.
“But we're in that sweet spot where you can live with a little bit of swing and miss if he's going to be hitting 30 to 35 home runs in a season, which he's certainly capable of.”
Dykstra makes an excellent point: Baez isn’t being challenged. And to improve, he’ll have to be challenged by a higher caliber of pitchers. And those cats work in the majors. So …
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
Before that Bernie spent a year at the Dallas Morning News, covering the Dallas Cowboys during Tom Landry’s final season (1988) plus the sale of the team to Jerry Jones and the hiring of Jimmy Johnson as coach.
Bernie has covered several Baseball Hall of Fame managers during his media career including Tony La Russa, Whitey Herzog, Earl Weaver, Joe Torre and (as an interim) Red Schoendienst. In his career as a beatwriter and columnist, Bernie covered Pro Football Hall of Fame coaches Joe Gibbs, Tom Landry, Jimmy Johnson and Dick Vermeil on a daily basis.
Bernie has covered and written about many great St. Louis sports team athletes including Albert Pujols, Kurt Warner, Brett Hull, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, Jim Edmonds, Marshall Faulk, Scott Rolen, Mark McGwire, Orlando Pace, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Adam Wainwright, Chris Carpenter, Al MacInnis, Brian Sutter, Bernie Federko, Chris Pronger, Dan Dierdorf, Jackie Smith and Aeneas Williams.
Bernie covered every baseball Cardinals’ postseason game from 1996 through 2014 and was there to chronicle teams that won four NL pennants and two World Series. He provided extensive coverage on the “Greatest Show” St. Louis Rams and has written extensively on the St. Louis Blues, Saint Louis U, and Mizzou football and basketball.
Bernie was/is a longtime voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Pro Football Hall of Fame, Heisman Trophy and the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him regularly on KMOX (AM or FM) as part of the Gashouse Gang, Sports Rush Hour, Sports Open Line or Sports On a Sunday Morning shows.
And you can catch weekly “reunion” segments here at STL Sports Central featuring Bernie and his longtime friend Randy Karraker.