Detroit Tigers celebrate winning AL wild card in 2025 MLB playoffs
The Detroit Tigers celebrate a 6-3 win over the Cleveland Guardians in Game 3 of the AL wild card, advancing to the ALDS in the 2025 MLB postseason.
He has saved the season more than once here lately. And though Javier Báez isn’t the only member of the Detroit Tigers to do so, he’s certainly the most unlikely, at least if we consider where the shortstop was a year ago.
Or even this spring.
Baez will tell you that he wasn’t sure he’d even be on the team this season when he got to spring training. Nor was he confident in how he’d perform after hip surgery in August 2024.
Here was a 32-year-old former All-Star, a defensive wizard with power plate who had arrived in Detroit three years earlier after signing a six-year, $140 million contract in December 2021 … and then played nowhere near the expectations created by that money.
The Tigers weren’t sure either. All they knew was that they owed Báez a lot of money, and that despite his struggles at the plate in his first three seasons, he still had talent. And experience. And a magnetic presence in the clubhouse.
Those things made it worth giving him a shot, right?
Boy, are the Tigers grateful they did. So is Báez, who isn’t hitting with the kind of power that made him a star for the Chicago Cubs but can still play with a touch of sparkle and a sense of the moment.
Now look at him, drenched in champagne twice in one week’s time, the darling of Tigers fans and his Tigers teammates, and a reminder that redemption, at least in baseball, is never more than a timely hit or game-saving catch away.
“I didn’t know if I was going to come back or if things were going to get better,” he said on July 2, not long after he’d found out he’d made the AL All-Star roster as the starting center fielder. “You know, I got my surgery, I got my work done. It’s paying off right now.”
And while his bat dipped the second half of the season, his work and return are paying off right now, too.
On the day the Tigers clinched a playoff spot in Boston with a win over the Red Sox – Saturday, Sept. 28 – Báez made a diving catch in shallow left field that stopped a Boston rally.
“Most important play of the game,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said that day.
Báez can make the spectacular look routine, though from his teammates’ reaction in the dugout when he landed face-first in the outfield grass with the ball in his glove, they understood exactly what they’d just watched.
You can argue the Tigers might have missed the postseason if he hadn’t caught that ball. At the least, Hinch would’ve been forced to pitch ace Tarik Skubal for the series finale against the Red Sox, and the left-hander might’ve missed the wild-card series against the Cleveland Guardians entirely.
So, yeah, he saved the season there.
Then did again a few times in Cleveland.
Let’s see, there was his bat – he went 5-for-11, including a leadoff double in the seventh inning Thursday that began the Tigers’ best offensive inning in three weeks. (That was after he went 6-for-16 during his final four regular-season games.)
There was his glove. Twice, he took throws to tag out José Ramírez at second base, each out stomping out the Guardians’ momentum.
The first came in the fourth inning, after Ramírez had singled to tie the game. Ramírez tried to steal second. Dillon Dingler gunned the ball to second and Báez caught it and snapped his glove so quickly to tag Ramirez you needed slow-motion replay to comprehend it.
The second came in the eighth, after reliever Will Vest dropped a throw at first base from Spencer Torkelson, who had fielded a grounder from Ramírez with two outs. Two runs scored. Vest sprinted toward the loose ball, turned, and rifled it to second. Once again, Báez was waiting in the perfect spot and quickly applied the tag.
That ended the inning, and the threat, and whatever voodoo Cleveland was trying to conjure up with it.
And then there were his feet, and his arm, and his sense of timing. He leapt and stabbed a line drive; he raced into left field and grabbed a flare; he scooted to his left – on two occasions – and gloved hard-hit balls and threw to first across his body to get the putouts.
And he made it look easy. Not to mention effortless. That it’s also stylish is a bonus, the caramel on top of some homemade vanilla bean ice cream. Báez is cool like that, and cooler still because he somehow mutes the swag with humility.
“Don’t try to do too much,” he said in Boston after the Tigers were celebrating their postseason berth, goggles strapped across his head, champagne dripping down his face.
That’s the mantra of his resurrection, and you can can hear the admiration in his teammates’ defense of him, as pitcher Jack Flaherty did with an ESPN reporter after the Tigers clinched the wild-card series Thursday.
“For anybody who wrote that guy off, you guys, you gotta look in the mirror,” he said, “especially after what he did this year, and how incredible he was. … That guy comes to play, he was incredible.”
They appreciate Báezs gifts, his fluidity, his style – the “El Mago mystique,” as Hinch called it recently. But they might respect the grind more, the journey from prodigy to near superstar to flailing former star – and back.
Or if not all the way back, then back to relevance, and back to contributing to winning baseball.
The Tigers aren’t in Seattle for the ALDS without him.
Contact Shawn Windsor: [email protected]. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
