Ben Baggett: A Story of Perserverance

  When his phone rang one night a little over a year ago in Florida, Ben Baggett couldn’t believe the location on the call display - Toronto.  At first, he thought it was a friend who was visiting the city and had maybe lost his phone.

 Ben Baggett took a long look in the mirror as a high school freshman in 2012, and admitted to himself that he lacked the size, speed, and strength to make it to The Show.  “Growing up,” the Riverdale, GA native said recently, “I was kind of physically underdeveloped.”.  Baggett began what he termed, “a journey to become a professional baseball player,” by diving headfirst into training methods both traditional and unconventional.  He didn’t know it at the time, but his road to pro ball would be a long, twisting, and mostly uphill one.

   Baggett read everything he could find from Kyle Boddy’s Driveline training academy, which was using industry-pioneering technology and data-driven analysis to become one of baseball’s premier, cutting-edge development academies.  Baggett and his father would often drive to the Texas Baseball Ranch, where he could absorb more innovative training methods, as well as a local training facility called The Armory.  The results were astonishing:  in a little over two years, he cut a second off of his 40-yard dash time, almost doubled his bench press personal best, and added 10 mph to his fastball.  In the process, Baggett set a Georgia high school strikeout mark - as a sophomore.  The sky, at that time, seemed to be the limit, and by his junior season, he had committed to Stanford.  “I felt as though I was on top of the world, and the journey would continue to be a cakewalk to the top,” Baggett said. “However, I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  In the spring of his senior year, Baggett rolled his ankle and fractured his foot, but while some may have treated that like a setback on the developmental highway, Baggett treated it like a speed bump.  His training continued full tilt, albeit on crutches.  Baggett did everything from playing long toss on his knees to leaving school early with a bucket of baseballs.  Baggett would toss the bucket of balls on the school’s football field, throwing them further and further, then hop along on his crutches to pick the balls up and start the whole process over again.  Over the course of three months, Baggett’s arm strength had developed to the point where he could long toss 300 feet - from his knees.  

  Finally rid of his crutches and cleared to begin throwing again after twelve weeks, Baggett did what most teenagers would do when Dad tossed them the keys to his sports car:  he decided to put the pedal to the metal, trying to light up the radar gun, and dialed it up to 95 in celebration.  Baggett hit a personal best; he also woke up with excruciating pain in his elbow the next morning.  A few weeks later, the pain had not abated, and Baggett re-fractured his foot.  Subsequently, he learned that he had a sprained UCL, and the fracture was one that was known for being difficult to heal.  Baggett had surgery on the foot, beginning him on a Sisyphian climb of injury and rehab.

  Little did he know the journey that lay ahead of him. “From that point on,” he reflected, I just kept spiraling and then it was a fight - honestly - mentally and emotionally”

 Ben with his parents on Senior Day

  Given the time off that his injuries necessitated, Baggett was a spectator for his first year at Stanford.  When he arrived on campus, Baggett said, “most of college baseball is figured out—coaches have their guys and their plans set up, and as a kid who hadn’t been able to pitch in about 2 years, (I) was not close to cracking that group.”  Baggett found a soul to commiserate with in the form of a teammate who was planning on transferring as a fourth-year graduate the following season, and the pair threw themselves headlong into training for the next four months:

   Squeezing our lifts, throwing, and velocity sessions around an entire college baseball season was brutal.  We would set off to the gym and pull-down hours after the games had ended. Nothing about it was convenient at all, but it was the only way we saw fit to make sure no time went to waste.

 Baggett had bumped his run-and-gun velo to 100, and was hitting the upper 90s off the mound as a result of that regimen.  But when it came playoff time, he wasn’t eligible to be on the postseason roster - he couldn’t even sit in the dugout.  So, as Stanford, the 8th-ranked team in the country, hosted a regional, Baggett and his training partner headed to the nearby football practice field with a radar gun and a speaker; Baggett broke through to 100 that day.  It was a bittersweet, but ultimately learning experience for him:

 On one hand, I was embarrassed.  I wasn’t even allowed to be on the field with the team so I’m on the neighboring field throwing balls as hard as possible blasting AC/DC. On the other hand, it taught me to get over myself. If you want something, go get it. It’s not about anyone else, it’s not about your pride, it’s about truly knowing you can get the job done and executing your plan.

“So I got the call, and I’m like, that’s weird….like maybe my buddy who is visiting Toronto can’t use his phone or something,” Baggett recalled almost a year after getting that late night call from the Great White North.  “I answered it kind of nonchalantly, like ‘Hey, what’s up?’”

Baggett’s shoulder issues flared up again after that freshman season.  He tried every option he could find for his shoulder the following year, but to no avail.  For all intents and purposes, he hadn’t thrown a competitive pitch in four years.  After his sophomore season, Baggett crashed on an air mattress in the apartment of an old friend who was interning at the Florida Baseball Ranch.  For the first time in years, he began to make progress.  

  Heading into his junior season at Stanford, Baggett was healthy and brimming with optimism.  He was running his fastball into the 90s, and said he felt like, “there was plenty more left in the tank.”  At his hometown training facility just a few weeks before the season started, Baggett was throwing harder than ever before - 102 - and decided to go for the facility record, when he felt a deep pop in his elbow.  He was devastated.  “I knew what it was right away,” he said.  An MRI confirmed his worst fears - a torn UCL.  Baggett opted for rehab and PRP therapy, but to no avail.  He underwent Tommy John surgery the following May.  Looking back, Baggett says this was one of two “big time” lows.  “The year started,” he said, “and then we kind of beat around the bush in terms of getting it properly assessed, because we knew it was torn…..and then I had surgery on the next to last weekend of the season.”

   Yet, despite having “three years just being ripped away,” in Baggett’s words, he once again threw himself into another rehab program.  In nine months, he was back to throwing at full throttle, hitting 97.  He was still two to three months away from returning to competition, but after only two bullpen sessions, he was back on the mound for Stanford in their first series in 2019.  Coming into the game in the top of the 9th with a ten-run lead, Baggett faced all of two hitters (walking both),  the first ive batters he’d faced in four years, and was removed from the game.  A few weeks later, he couldn’t even bend his elbow.

  Recovering from Tommy John surgery is a complicated process.  For many pitchers that I’ve talked to, it’s a lonely one, too.  Some come back better than ever in twelve months, much more conscious of the need to take their conditioning, diet, and daily throwing regimens seriously,  while others take much longer than that - if ever - to regain their previous form.  For Baggett, this proved to be yet another valley in a mountainous career.  And his journey was far from over.  While the whole Tommy John experience, which left him feel “numb,” the end of his four years with Stanford - with all of one inning to show for it - was the lowest point of his whole ordeal:

  To go from striking out more hitters than anyone ever in a single season in the state of Georgia, to a career at the pinnacle of college baseball filled with 4 years of misery was one of the toughest and humbling experiences I could have ever imagined. I felt as though I wasn’t even close to the athlete I was in high school and couldn’t stay healthy enough to get back to that point.

  After mulling over some free agent offers (Baggett went undrafted in 2019)  and ultimately declining them, Baggett decided to start an MBA and join his good friend Alec Hammond, who had just been hired as Director of Player Development at  Florida Southern, a Division Two powerhouse.  It was Hammond who introduced Baggett to concepts of throwing from javelin competitors.  Before long, Hammond had Baggett hitting 100 once more, and mid-90s off the mound.  But lingering complications from Tommy John set in, and by the time the season began, his elbow wasn’t up to par.  He tried, in typical Baggett fashion, to battle through it; but after pitching, he would need to take a week off in order for the pain to subside.  Eventually, his shoulder, which had been taking much of the strain as he tried to pitch through the elbow issues, began to cause him trouble.  Baggett was taking whatever he could to dull the pain while he continued to pitch, hoping an MLB team would make him an offer at the conclusion of his collegiate campaign, but he knew he wasn’t the same pitcher - his velo had dropped 5-7 mph.

  And then came COVID-19.  

  Baggett, understandably, was despondent.   “(After) a whopping total of 6 college innings,” he lamented, “I was in the same exact place as I started—in pain and on the shelf without any clue what was about to happen.”

  The 2020 draft came and went, with no offers for Baggett, who certainly was in no shape to pitch.  Once again, he plumbed the depths of his soul, trying to find answers.  He felt like he had been dealt a bad hand, but somehow, some way, he couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that he was at least partially to blame.  “I felt as though there were things I was missing,” he said.  “I felt as though it was my fault, there was something that I could have done to avoid this….or at least get healthier quicker.”  With no pro prospects on the immediate horizon, Baggett decided to finish his MBA, then set off once again in search of those answers and the key to unlock the door to his long-term health.  He couch-surfed in North Carolina, where he sought out renowned chiropractor and rehab specialist Dr Nevin Markel.  Baggett “hammered out” training sessions under Markel’s supervision by day, and continued with business classes by night.  By a stroke of good fortune, one of Baggett’s friends from Driveline, Ian Walsh, had come to North Carolina for post doc work and to work with a high school team.  

   By the start of 2021, Baggett continued to train and study, and also got involved with coaching through Walsh.  He found working with high school kids to be very rewarding.  “Some of the stories I have from a personal standpoint….” he said.  “Like helping a kid from a difficult family environment get to college, or getting a birthday cake for a kid who had never celebrated his birthday before.” It was the beginning of a journey of personal discovery for Baggett:  “the ability to impact others has been phenomenal.  And so now being in baseball again, it just gives me a whole new perspective.  It makes the whole process that much easier for me.”

   The voice on the phone introduced himself.  “This is Joe Sheehan of the Blue Jays.”  Baggett couldn’t believe an MLB executive was calling him.  He didn’t even know how Sheehan got his number.  “I guess when you’re the Assistant GM of the Blue Jays,” Baggett later reflected, “you can get whoever’s phone number you want.”

   While he was helping coach high school players, Baggett continued full speed ahead with his training:  “I was going to be turning 26 right before the approaching season and with 6 innings since I was a junior in high school, the chances of getting anywhere were extremely low.”  But rather than focusing on hitting a number on the radar gun, or getting signed by a certain team, Baggett just tried to create what he called, “the greatest version of myself.” That meant training morning, afternoon, and night with pro and high school players.  And without the pressure of those specific goals, Baggett found himself not only enjoying his training even more than before, he was - for the first time in years - finally healthy. “The ball was coming out of my hand better than ever,” he enthused.  “I felt as though the thousands of hours I had spent building the qualities necessary over a 10-year period were all finally coming together.”

  But there was an underlying sense of urgency.  With the 2022 season approaching, Baggett’s personal clock was ticking loudly as the calendar rolled over from January to February.  He had long tossed almost 400 feet, could properly throw a javelin, but felt intimidated by the radar gun, which would be the final arbiter of his progress.  There was a part of him fighting the fear of failure, despite how far he had come.  But he approached that fear, as he does with most things, philosophically:

 Was there anything to lose? Absolutely not. Objectively, I was a nobody. I was a guy who had experimented with himself and trained for over 8 years to figure out what works and why.  Realistically, I had to accept that if nothing happened, it would just be another step in the process and just another learning lesson.

  When the day to pitch for the gun game, Baggett hit a personal best of 102, and moments later, 104, with some shuffle warm-up throws.  Walsh demanded he get on the mound.  He threw 95-97, with some nasty sliders thrown in for good measure.  Walsh put the results up on Twitter for the world to see:

  Not only did Baggett perform for the radar gun, he felt two things he hadn’t felt in some time:  no pain the next day, and more importantly, considerable inner peace.  Perhaps he didn’t realize it at the time, but after a long and arduous trek, everything was coming together for him.  The tens of thousands of hours, all the lifting, work with weighted balls, and pulldowns were about to finally pay off.  After abandoning the “get back to where I once was” mindset, Baggett felt closer to the best version of himself that he had ever reached.  “I was filled with gratitude for everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—which there had been a lot of,” he observed.  

  After the videos of him throwing were posted, Baggett was hopeful, but not even someone with his level of hyper-optimism could be prepared for another phone call only hours later.  On the other end of the phone, Sheehan told Baggett that they would like him to throw for Brandon Bishoff, the Jays Florida scout.  Baggett was dumbfounded:  “I get off the phone, look at my roommate, who’s now the Dodgers’ pitching coordinator, and I’m like, ‘that was the Assistant Manager of the Blue Jays.’ And he just looked at me and his jaw dropped.”  Baggett knew Bishoff from his time at Florida Southern.  Bishoff got in touch with him shortly after the call with Sheehan ended, and the next day, after doing some background work on Baggett, Sheehan called again - 20 minutes before Baggett’s wedding rehearsal dinner, before he was to wed his longtime girlfriend Jordan DeBiasi, a midfielder with the NWSL’s Washington Spirit (the two had met at Stanford).  This time, Sheehan offered Baggett a contract. Baggett was moved to tears:

   “I’m not a very emotional person, but I remember getting off the phone, and everything started to water and I began crying.  It was the exact opposite of that low point when I blew out my elbow.  Your dream is to play in the big leagues, but to have gone through everything that I had been through, and come out the other side - it was overwhelming.”

  A close friend had warned Baggett that he would likely be starting at the bottom of the ladder, and sure enough, after some time in Extended, made his pro debut with Dunedin of the Florida State League in June.  He was five years older than the average FSL player.  The Blue Jays brought him along slowly; he appeared in a Complex League game in June, then made his full season debut with Dunedin on June 15th.  D-Jays Manager Donnie Murphy moved Baggett into late inning, leverage situations in August, as Dunedin - fuelled by an influx of draftees - surged to a second half title and a playoff berth.  For the season, Baggett appeared in 13 games, throwing 19.2 innings.  He fanned better than a batter per inning (22Ks) and did not issue a walk.  His velo dipped, as would be expected, toward the end of the season - he averaged just a tick below 95 in his next-to-last outing, but almost everything Baggett throws moves.  Eric Longenhagen of Fangraphs saw him early in the season, and noted that Baggett had 24” of movement on his four-seamer; his changeup, which has plenty of arm-side run, has great depth of movement, and his frisbee of a slider is a bat dodger.

  As the season neared its end, Baggett was about as close to a lock as one could get in the back end of the Dunedin bullpen.  Had he not owned such a lengthy injury history, there is little doubt he would have been in Vancouver (or even New Hampshire) by season’s end.  Baggett knows that his journey is far from over, but now he has some control over his destiny.  “I don’t want to be knocked out of the game because of an injury,” he said recently, “I just want to be knocked out because someone’s better than me.”

  Throughout it all, Baggett credits the love, patience, and wisdom of his soccer-playing spouse Jordan.  “She’s a much better athlete than me,” jokes Baggett, who said due to his post-secondary injury issues, “the closest I’d been to a real athlete was playing intramural flag football.”  He also noted that while he was injured, she had a “ton of success” both at the collegiate and professional levels, but after Jordan was put on concussion protocol after a scary on-field collision last May, “the tables were kind of flipped.”  His own injury and recovery experiences helped him counsel his wife.  “Just being able to help guide her through the medical stuff,” he said, “and how to support her and understand what she’s going through….she’s been so supportive of me, it was awesome to be able to help her through it all.”   Baggett says Jordan, like himself, is now symptom and pain free (she had hamstring and hip injuries prior to the concussion), and ready to start her season.

  What does 2023 hold for Baggett?  While Sheehan understandably didn’t want to commit to a starting point, but did say that while it’s still early, “it all starts with him staying healthy and showing what he can do.”  Off the record, people in the organization have hinted that if all goes well for Baggett over the next few weeks, he could follow a path similar to that of Hayden Juenger last year:  an aggressive promotion to AA, perhaps with time as an opener in the first half of the season to help accelerate his development and make up for so many innings lost over the past half-dozen years.  If things go well in New Hampshire, like Juenger in 2022,  Baggett too may find himself on the cusp of a big league job by season’s end.  

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   Sheehan admitted that he’s regularly scrolling through social media to find potential diamonds in the rough like Baggett toiling deep under baseball ground.  Baggett was not the first player the Blue Jays have signed through this unconventional scouting method.  Sheehan really liked Baggett’s approach to pitching, telling me, “he’s very thoughtful in his approach - he’s clearly given things like how to throw, and how to get himself ready a ton of thought.”  

  As in the cases of so many out-of-the-box signings like Baggett’s, you can’t overlook the importance of the work Brandon Bishoff put in.  He likely was aware of Baggett’s lengthy injury history, at least in general terms, but that didn’t deter him from establishing a baseline rapport and relationship with him.  With other teams likely looking at that Twitter video, Bishoff’s advance work helped Baggett quickly decide to sign with Toronto.  

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  I really wanted to get into discussing javelin throwing with Ben and how it helped his progress, but I was a little bit short on time.  Pitching guru Tom House has used videos of javelin throwers to help pitchers understand the mechanical concepts he was teaching long before such methods became commonplace.  I emailed Ben to ask him if he could follow up on the brief javelin discussion we’d had.  Here’s his response:

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  I also emailed Ben a follow up about the people he’d like to give credit to, friendly innkeepers along his lengthy road to pro ball.  Again, mainly because he was so thorough and articulate in his response, I present his response in full:

Not every piece that I write will be long-form like this, but Ben’s story is one I really wanted to tell. If you would like to support my work, please consider buying me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dmfoxF

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