With Harrison Bader, there's always a catch

It’s a funny trick baseball likes to play, one Harrison Bader refuses to fall for.

There are metrics upon metrics to predict future success. Player performance is optimized, and some athletes specialize as young as Little League. Everything is done in an attempt to control the uncontrollable — to make sure 26 athletes in peak physical condition play 162 games en route to postseason glory.

Then a ball is thrown, or a bat is swung, or a guy steps on the bag funny, and everything blows up in predictably spectacular fashion.

Bader is intimately acquainted with all of this.

The Yankees centerfielder is on the injured list for the second time this year as he rehabs his hamstring. He has seen his career routinely derailed by nicks large and small.

He’s been a rising star in the Cardinals’ organization. He’s seen his bat go dead. He knows what it’s like to lose a starting job. He was optioned to the minors just over two years ago after being in the Rookie of the Year conversation. There was COVID, and that didn’t help anyone’s career. He won a Gold Glove in 2021.

Cardinal for life? Not anymore, buddy — you’re going to the Yankees (that was in 2022, in a trade for Jordan Montgomery that was mostly panned at the time from a Yankees perspective).

It’s been a grab bag of a career, but it’s also why Bader is so quick to relish preparation and defense — that is, the few parts of the game he actively can control.

In his short time with the Yankees, it’s given fans a peek into potential stardom.

The book on Bader is this: His defense is on the higher end of the elite and his bat can be electric. “Can be,” because he actually has to be on the field for anyone to see it.

But there’s no guaranteeing health, right? So when Bader does cobble together enough working body parts to play, he might as well make the most of what he can guarantee.

“Defense, for me, is really important because when I came up with the Cardinals, I was off the bench and [then-manager] Mike Matheny really loved the way I got after it on defense,” Bader, 29, told Newsday. “I was a late-inning addition so it kind of bought me at-bats. That’s why I treat it really seriously — like I do everything else — but defense has a special place in my heart.”

It’s a credit to that defense — and his offensive production in limited time — that despite his injury history, Bader is becoming something of a favorite in the Bronx.

The Bronxville native was hitting .267 with 19 RBIs in 26 games before getting hurt on May 29. He had a 1.1 bWAR — notable because WAR is cumulative, and he’s above average despite appearing in less than half of the Yankees’ games this year.

That, too, goes back to taking care of what he can control. He didn’t love how he was hitting when he joined the Yankees late last season, so he changed it,  switching to a different bat before the American League Division Series. He hit five home runs that postseason and very quickly silenced the detractors who were angry at general manager Brian Cashman for sending Montgomery to St. Louis.

(It didn’t help that Bader showed up in the Bronx after that trade literally wearing an orthopedic boot to treat plantar fasciitis.)

“He’s a spark plug,” Aaron Judge said last month. “He’s a Gold Glove centerfielder that’s hustling around the bases. Just his at-bats, his approach at the plate. He goes up there with a plan and he executes it. It’s fun to see that. He brings that energy, man, and you need that when you’re playing 162 . . . It’s special.”  

All-out effort

The defense, though, is where Bader goes from good to what FanGraphs deemed “generational” in a recent statistical breakdown.

He has five outs above average on 73 attempts, according to Baseball Savant, tying him for fifth among outfielders. Luis Robert Jr. of the White Sox leads MLB with eight outs above average — in 190 attempts.

Bader’s four runs prevented are tied for seventh (he was near the very top of the leaderboards before going on the IL).

“It’s about your level of focus, watching a play develop in front of you, understanding what the pitcher is trying to do to the hitter, knowing what type of hitter the guy is . . . knowing where to position yourself,” Bader said before he got hurt. “All these things are in your control before the pitch is thrown to be able to react to what happens in front of you. In a game with so many uncontrollable things, I really want to focus every single pitch on all the things I can control.”

According to Baseball Savant, Bader catches seven percentage points more than he’s expected to, which is best among all outfielders. Despite a slightly below-average reaction time, he makes up a lot of ground because of his initial burst and his route decisions — something that translates to him covering an average of 36.8 feet in center, with a jump 1.7 feet longer than average, per Baseball Savant.

There are “the wow plays that he gives you because he is athletic and the ground he covers and [how] he can really throw — but I think [what stands out] it’s how serious he takes it,” manager Aaron Boone said. “He works at it. He prepares. You see him on routine balls flip his hips around and get behind the ball. He’s very fundamentally sound and takes that part of it seriously. So while being blessed with athleticism and the ability to really go get it, he does all the fundamental things really well, and that puts him in the position to be the kind of outfielder that he is.”

Bader says part of it has to do with specializing in the outfield early on and honing the skill at the University of Florida. But he’s also out there during batting practice gauging how the ball is coming off the bat. He looks at tendencies and trajectories and how things are playing in the wind.

“You kind of stay in a circle out there and swivel your hips, taking your first two or three steps toward the ball,” Bader said about his work during batting practice. “It’s about having the confidence to go out there so when the situation presents itself, you take the right route.” 

Staying on the field

Bader can dive with the best of them and doesn’t consider himself overly cautious, but he does agree there’s an art to falling — something that no doubt helps when the biggest knock against you is that you can’t stay in one piece. He catches the ball with two hands if he can, “like a football,” and tries to protect his wrists and fingers so he doesn’t jam them on contact.

The irony is that Bader hasn’t hurt himself this year flinging his body across the outfield grass. The month-long IL stint at the beginning of the season was from an oblique injury he suffered while swinging during spring training. He hurt his right hamstring while legging out an infield single.

But that’s baseball, right? A control sport with a penchant for chaos.

“There are a lot of controllable factors on defense, which is rare,” Bader said. “In baseball, there are a lot of things that happen with regards to results that you really can’t control.”

Three days after saying that, he left in the third inning of a win over the Mariners with a Grade 1 hamstring strain. His rehab is going well, and he doesn’t expect to be on the IL too much longer. He won’t play in the first Subway Series of the season, which starts Tuesday night at Citi Field.

“I want to put myself in a position where I feel really, really good and confident so I can help the team,” he told reporters last week. “That feels like it’s right around the corner.”

He didn’t put a timeline on it, though he does appear to be close. After all, he knows as well as anyone that in this sport, “around the corner” can be a long, meandering walk.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. She's been covering MLB since 2014 after starting at Newsday as an intern seven years earlier.