Pedigree
Ednel Javier Baez was the last 1st round pick of the Jim Hendry regime, taken right after Francisco Lindor and right before Cory Spangenberg (if I remember correctly, the Padres (Hoyer) had Baez on their Big Board put he was popped right before thanks to Mario Sanchez, I had this completely opposite). Drafted from relatively anonymous Arlington Country Day School in Jacksonville, Florida (he’ll be the first draftee from their to make the majors) with the 9th pick, Baez immediately shot up to the top of the prospect lists. While no part of Baez’ game was lacking, he started to show preternatural ability to swing a baseball bat. Here’s a fun scouting report on him from 2011, and here’s what BA had to say:
Baez matched up with fellow Puerto Rican native and Florida prep shortstop Francisco Lindor in February in the season’s most heavily scouted high school game, with as many as 100 scouts on hand. Baez and Lindor have more contrasts than similarities, though. Where Lindor is smooth and lauded for his makeup, Baez is explosive and scouts generally pan his makeup. He lives with his high school coach (who is also his legal guardian), though his mother remains in the picture. His bat is too good to ignore, though, and offensively he has few peers in this year’s draft. He has the fastest bat in the draft, and while he has a dead-pull approach at times, he has the bat speed to let balls get deep in the zone. Baez has plus raw power as well, which may serve him well if he has to move to third base. He has the defensive tools to stay at short until he outgrows it, as at 6-foot-1, 205 pounds, he doesn’t have much range to spare. He has plenty of arm for either position. His tools fit the catcher profile, but his makeup does not. He plays with energy, but it’s not always positive, and he turns off some scouts with emotional outbursts and an off-field demeanor some describe as aloof. He’s committed to Jacksonville.
Since his draft day, we’ve seen the agony (30% K in AAA) and the ecstasy (80 minor league HR). It’s finally Baez time. What can we expect?
Offense
Baez has extreme bat speed. Without hyperbole, I can safely say it’s one of the best in the majors right now, and that’s without swinging a bat. It’s an easy 80 on the 20-80 scale, and it allows him to have excellent power to all fields at all times. He could guess curve and still crush the fastball, and I bet he will from time to time. The downside to all that power is a devil-may-care approach to his plate appearances. He can hit anything, but that doesn’t mean he will hit anything. Instead of looking for his pitch, he has a tendency to try to make any pitch his pitch, and that will result in poor contact and strikeouts. While Baez has bat speed to spare, his actual bat control is more fringe-average; major league pitching could expose that (and it will at times). That takes an 80 raw power and plays it at a 60 (which is still good).
Baez strikes out at a clip anywhere from 20.4% (at A) to 30.0% (at AAA). Only 4 people exceed 30% in the majors, and none of them have a WAR above 0.8 this year. To be successful with that profile, you have to hit a lot of home runs or walk a lot (preferably both). The former should come easy to Javier, and the latter is more likely than you might think at first blush. Like fellow young gun Arismendy Alcantara, Baez’ walk rate for the most part only gets better the higher he goes. Baez walked 3.8% of the time at A, but 7.8% of the time at AAA.
The reason you need HR and BB is BABIP. If you have a .300 BABIP, and a 30% K rate, your batting average is right around .210 (plus your home runs). You’d need a 12% walk rate or so just to get to a .300 OBP in that case. Baez’ BABIP will probably be around .310 in the majors (his contact is loud. I can only guess at batted ball profiles, but I imagine he’ll have more grounders and line drive than the average hitter, which are the components of BABIP that are higher than flyballs), so it’s feasible to envision Baez as a .240-.250 hitter in the majors. If he walks at around a 6.5% clip (a reasonable assumption), and hits around 25-30 home runs (which is what I’d project reasonably), I’d spitball a projection right at .245/.300/.480.
That’s right in line with the Oliver projection (.240/.292/.495, 35 HR), though Oliver projects Baez to strike out a full 34% of this plate appearances. That would lead the world in the stat. It also projects Baez to walk only 5.8% of the time (which does seem reasonable). All told, that’s a .337 wOBA and a 110 wRC+, which seem like reasonable median outcomes.
The problem, of course, is that there are almost no median outcomes with Javier, and that’s because there are no real comparisons to Javier. His profile doesn’t come around once in a generation, it just comes around once. He has the bat speed of Gary Sheffield, but nowhere near the plate discipline. Comps simply don’t exist for him, so it’s almost folly to even try. It’s much more likely that Baez hits .190/.240/.310 or .270/.340/.560 then .240/.292/.495 in my opinion.
The perpetuating narrative is that Baez struggles at every level he’s been promoted to. It’s lazy and it’s false. When Baez was promoted to AA, he immediately dominated it. When he was promoted to A, he immediately dominated it. Don’t buy into that lazy excuse; he has struggled before when promoted (A+, AAA), but it was just as common for him to succeed right away. He likely will struggle on the outset, as hitting major league pitching is incredibly difficult. Just don’t let people tell you it’s his MO.
While he doesn’t always struggle early on, Baez has shown that he can get better as the season goes on. This year, his OPS increased every single month:
April: .172/.238/.379/.617
May: .250/.303/.435/.738
June: .275/.345/.471/.815
July: .300/.344/.655/.999
August: .300/.500/.900/1.400 (10 AB)
While it’s not exactly relevant, it’s also nice to see that Baez is better with runners with scoring position (.999 OPS) than not (.819 bases empty OPS).
Defense
I couldn’t help but chuckle when reading the BA scouting report on how Baez could catch. That certainly would be something, wouldn’t it? As it stands, Baez is probably a fringe-average SS (though he’s improving and could easily be average there given reps), and an average 2B. He plays with his hair on fire, and like Castro, he makes the harder plays more often than the average fielder but the easier plays less often. All accounts are that he loves working on his defense, and he hasn’t filled out so much that he couldn’t play in the middle of the infield for the foreseeable future. Oliver has Baez projected as a well above-average second baseman (almost certainly an artifact of his switch from a more demanding position), and I think that oversells his utility there (at least in the short-term).
Physically, Baez is roughly 6 feet tall and 205 pounds. If he gets heavier, range will start to become more a factor, indicating that 3B might be a better fit than 2B (and his arm is plus, so 3B should be no problem). The Cubs currently have a surfeit of 3B in the upper minors/majors, though, so 2B is the optimal landing point right now. Having caught maybe 10 attempts of his at 2B (including a game in which he committed 2 errors or something like that), he physically looks like he’s overqualified there, but he does not look comfortable. That will come, and when it does, he should shine.
Outlook
It’s a fool’s errand to project what will happen in just 50 games, but I imagine Baez will swing out of his shoes and struggle mightily early on. The worst thing that can happen is for him to be successful in all the wrong ways early on. If Baez has bad plate appearances, it’s important they have bad outcomes. The sooner he struggles, the sooner he can adjust to the increased quality of his opponents. The Cubs dealt with this probably earlier this year with Mike Olt – he consistently turned it awful plate appearances, but since he hit 7 early home runs, he was trotted out there every game to try to recreate that fluky magic. I hope the same doesn’t happen here.
It’s also important to measure expectations if he doesn’t improve right away. Keep in mind that Baez only has 1350 or so PA in Major League Baseball. He’ll be one of the 10 youngest batters in the majors (something he’s used to – he’s consistently been the youngest player in his league). Other recent top-10 prospects generally have had more minor-league seasoning than Baez, too:
Wil Myers: 1933 PA
Xander Bogaerts: 1623 PA
Jurickson Profar: 1532 PA
Javier Baez: 1350 PA
Christian Yelich: 1308 PA
If 2014 is 50 games of terrible baseball, that’s not unreasonable or unexpected. There’s little chance it would change who Baez is as a prospect or a player. The sooner people can realize that Mike Trout and Bryce Harper are the exceptions and not the rules, we can start to temper our expectations for Bye-Baez (eh? eh?). Superstars aren’t normally built overnight. With Baez, we may get one someday.