Joshua Báez stepped onto Wrigley Field for the first time in a major league uniform and immediately did something no one in baseball history had ever done: he hit a home run in his first at-bat. Then he did it again in his second. And then, somehow, he did it a third time.

Three at-bats. Three home runs. A debut unlike anything the sport has ever seen.

More than 23,000 players have appeared in a major league game. None of them had ever gone deep three times in their first game.

It’s just unreal. For me to not only get a hit, but hit three home runs is just crazy.

Honestly, “crazy” might be the only word that fits.

Three At-Bats, Three Different Answers

Báez didn’t really ease into anything. Two outs, runner on, first inning — and Cubs starter Matthew Boyd comes right at him with a 93.4 mph fastball up in the zone. Báez didn’t overthink it. First big league pitch he ever sees, and he absolutely hammers it 449 feet to dead center.

It left the bat at 108.6 mph. St. Louis was up 3-0 before most people had even settled in, and Báez already had a home run in the majors before he’d even had a chance to feel out a major league at-bat.

And honestly, one swing like that would’ve been more than enough. That’s the kind of raw power people have been talking about with him forever.

But then he came back up in the fourth and showed it wasn’t just a one-off adrenaline swing. Full count, Boyd tries to sneak a changeup down, and Báez just stays on it and pulls it 382 feet into the left-field seats. That one broke a 3-3 tie and, just like that, he became only the second player since 1900 to homer in each of his first two career at-bats in the same game — the other being Bob Nieman back in 1951.

By the sixth inning, he’d already done enough to make it one of the best debuts St. Louis has ever seen. Then Boyd goes to a slider, and Báez doesn’t miss that either — 99.8 mph off the bat, 368 feet the other way into the right-field seats.

Three at-bats. Three home runs. Three different pitches. Three different parts of Wrigley.

That’s what made it feel so wild — it wasn’t just him guessing right or getting lucky. He handled a high fastball, stayed on a changeup down, and then went the other way on a slider. The three homers went a combined 1,199 feet and drove in five runs in an 8-4 Cardinals win.

His next at-bat turned into its own little moment. Wrigley actually stood up as he came up in the eighth with a chance at four. He ended up lining out to left, but the crowd still gave him a round of applause anyway.

Báez said afterward he didn’t even really notice everyone standing. He was just trying to breathe, slow things down, and treat it like a normal at-bat — even though the whole day had stopped being normal a long time ago.

The Power Was Always Loud

The easy thing to do after a debut like this is to start talking about Báez like he’s the next can’t-miss superstar who showed up right on schedule.

But that’s not really how this went.

St. Louis took him 54th overall in 2021 and paid him $2.25 million to skip going to Vanderbilt. He was a 6-foot-3, 220-pound outfielder with ridiculous raw power, a cannon for an arm (he’d hit 97 mph off the mound in high school), and the kind of confidence that had him saying he’d be in the big leagues in a couple years.

It took five.

And those five years weren’t smooth. Not even close.

The tools were always there, which is why teams kept hanging on, but actually hitting pro pitching was a different story. In 2023 at Single-A Palm Beach, he hit .218 with seven homers and struck out in 34.1% of his plate appearances. He went from being one of the Cardinals’ top five prospects to sitting at No. 30 in the system by the next spring.

Even then, you always saw what he could do. In the 2024 Spring Breakout game, he launched a 455-foot homer — one of the longest balls anyone in the organization had hit all year. It was the classic Báez experience.

The strikeouts crept up to 35.5% that year, and eventually St. Louis basically hit pause on his season. They put him on the development list, pulled him out of games, and rebuilt things with him from the ground up. Less movement, a cleaner path to the ball, a more direct setup — just trying to simplify everything that had gotten too noisy.

And it worked.

In 2025, he came back looking like a different hitter. Between High-A Peoria and Double-A Springfield, he hit .287 with a .384 OBP and a .500 slug. Twenty homers, 54 steals, and the strikeouts dropped all the way to 20.6%. Only he and Konnor Griffin finished the year with 20+ homers and 50+ steals in the minors.

A guy who started the year outside the Cardinals’ top 30 prospects suddenly found himself in the league's Top 100 conversation. St. Louis added him to the 40-man in November, and once he got to Triple-A, the power somehow ticked up again.

Then came June 16th — the third anniversary of his father Jose Manuel’s passing. Báez hit four home runs that night for Memphis, the first player in Redbirds history to do it.

I was just feeling him the whole time. I think that he guided me today to be able to do that.

By the time the Cardinals called him up, he was hitting .256 with 34 homers, 90 RBIs, and 21 steals in 103 Triple-A games. He led the level in barrels by a mile (55, 12 more than anyone else), and more than half his balls in play were 95+ mph. His hardest hit? 115.4.

That’s not normal minor league power.

Now Comes The Part Nobody Can Script

St. Louis didn’t bring Báez up just for a feel-good moment. The Cardinals were sitting at 61-61, 3½ games out of the last Wild Card spot, so this was very much a “we need help now” kind of move. And with Lars Nootbaar gone at the deadline, there was a real opening in left field that needed filling.

Báez can handle all three outfield spots, he’s got enough speed to be a threat on the bases, and the arm plays anywhere you stick him. And yeah, the power is real — he gives a lineup with guys like JJ Wetherholt and Jordan Walker another bat that pitchers actually have to respect.

But none of that means it’s all figured out. The strikeouts are still part of the story. At Triple-A, he was back up around a 29.5% strikeout rate, and a lot of the same issues showed up again — fastballs up, sliders away, the usual stuff that’s given him trouble before. Big league pitchers don’t miss those holes. They find them, they hammer them, and they keep going until you prove you can adjust.

And honestly, that adjustment might’ve already started. Because one day after the three-homer explosion, Báez came back down to earth in a hurry — 0-for-5 with three strikeouts as the Cardinals still beat Chicago again.

That game was way less fun. But it’s probably a more honest preview of what’s coming.

There will be more homers. That part feels inevitable — he hits the ball too hard for it not to show up again. But there will also be rough nights and stretches where pitchers make him look very human. That’s just how it goes when the league starts circling your weaknesses.

What happens next is going to come down to whether the swing changes that got him here in 2025 actually hold up when the lights are brightest. One wild, historic game doesn’t answer that. Even one this ridiculous.

Now the real test is everything after that.

All stats courtesy of MLB.com.

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