Joshua Baez Homers on First Career Pitch: Cardinals Rookie Makes MLB History in Debut vs Cubs
Joshua Baez saw one Major League pitch in his career. He hit it 449 feet.
The 23-year-old Cardinals prospect stepped into the box at Wrigley Field on Friday night, dug in against Cubs starter Matthew Boyd, and launched the first offering he ever saw as a big leaguer over the center field wall. A two-run shot in the first inning to put St. Louis up 3-0. Then he did it again. And again.
Baez became the first player in MLB history to homer in each of his first three career plate appearances. Not the first this decade. The first ever. That is a record that has been sitting there since 1876 waiting for somebody to touch it, and a Dominican-American kid out of Boston walked into Wrigley and grabbed it in his debut.
The first-pitch homer alone is a rare thing. Baez is the first player to do it since Willson Contreras with the 2016 Cubs, in a lovely bit of full-circle. Contreras is now a Cardinal. Baez is now the Cardinal. Wrigley just watched history happen against the home team.
The 449-foot number is the longest first-pitch debut homer since Statcast started tracking distances in 2008. Nothing about the swing looked nervous. Nothing about the swings that followed did either.
Some context on the player. Baez is a 2021 second-round pick who has been slow-cooking through the Cardinals system for four years. He ranks 59th on MLB Pipeline’s top-100 list and third in the Cardinals farm. He was not the top prospect knocking on the door. He was the guy who happened to be scorching in Triple-A when the call came.
Now every scout who put a middling grade on his hit tool is scrambling. The raw power was never a question. Baez has always been an easy plus-plus with a chance for 80 pop at maturity. The concerns were swing decisions and contact rate. On Friday night, none of that mattered, because he was on time for everything the Cubs threw.
Small sample, obviously. Nobody is projecting a 60-homer season off three at-bats. But the moment matters. Cardinals baseball has been searching for exactly this kind of jolt for two years. A homegrown power bat announcing himself on national television against the biggest division rival is the shot of adrenaline this fanbase has been waiting for since Nolan Arenado’s peak.
Oli Marmol has to figure out how to handle the roster now. Baez was likely getting a look for the last six weeks of the season regardless. After Friday night, he is not going back to Memphis unless he collapses. That is a good problem.
The Cardinals have been floating between contention and rebuild all summer. Baez does not fix the pitching staff. He does not solve the bullpen. But he gives St. Louis a young middle-of-the-order threat to build around, and he did it in the most memorable way possible.
Debuts are usually about surviving. Joshua Baez took his and rewrote the record book.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
