by Deb Seymour ~ August 4, 2022
This is the kind of story baseball fans love to hear. It’s a story about a player who grew up a fan of the team for whom he’ll now be playing; a story about a player who lived throughout his childhood near that very team’s ballpark; and a story about a player who always dreamed of playing for his favorite team.
Harrison Bader was born in Bronxville, NY and grew up playing shortstop in the Eastchester Little League, with his father pitching to him every night from when he was five years old. He attended Horace Mann High School in Riverdale in the Bronx, and played center field for the Horace Mann baseball team. Bader was named first-team all-region, first-team all-state, first-team all-city, and named to the 2012 Rawlings Northeast All-Region First Team. While attending high school, Bader also played for the New York Grays, a travel baseball team.
Although Bader’s childhood was not concurrent with the playing years of Roger Maris, Maris was nevertheless his childhood idol and the player whom Bader most aspired to emulate.
Bader, who somewhere along the way acquired the nickname “Tots,” went on to play for the University of Florida Gators, and had a successful three years of collegiate baseball, becoming only the 11th player in school history to record over 20 home runs, over 100 RBIs, and over 30 steals during his time at the university.
In the 2015 Major League Baseball draft, Bader was chosen 100th overall (in the third round of the draft) by the St. Louis Cardinals. He progressed through the ranks of the Cardinals’ minor league system fairly quickly, and MLB Pipeline named him the Cardinals 2016 Minor League Player of the Year. Bader was also named an MiLB 2016 Organization All Star.
On July 25, 2017, the Cardinals promoted Bader to the major leagues to take the place of the injured Dexter Fowler. That night, he started in center field and batted seventh; and he recorded his first major league hit, a double, and scored the winning run on a walk-off sac fly against the Colorado Rockies. He hit his first MLB home run, a 395-foot shot to left field, on September 1, 2017, off Johnny Cueto — leading the Cardinals to an 11–6 win over the San Francisco Giants in their own stadium. In 2017, in which he had 85 at-bats for the Cardinals, his sprint speed was 30.0 feet/second, 10th-fastest of all major leaguers with 25 or more competitive runs.
From the 2017 MLB season to the 2022 MLB season, Bader established himself as a top-tier defensive outfielder with significantly above average speed.
On April 3, 2022, Bader and the Cardinals agreed to a two-year, $10.4 million contract to avoid arbitration. Bader hit an inside-the-park home run on May 10, the first hit by a Cardinal since Vince Coleman in 1985. On June 27, the Cardinals put Bader on the 10-day injured list due to plantar fasciitis in his right foot. At the time of Bader’s trade to the Yankees, he was batting .256/.303/.370 with five home runs in 246 at-bats, with 15 stolen bases (5th in the NL) in 17 attempts, and had been errorless in center field.
Bader’s career MLB WAR is 11.8 and career OPS is .729. He’s suffered a few injuries prior to the current plantar fasciitis, but he won the NL gold glove for center field last year and came in sixth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2018. His former and now current teammate, Matt Carpenter, has only high praise for the 28-year-old New Yorker, who attended Yankee games as a kid and now hopes to actually play for them prior to the end of this season. Bader says his goal is to help the team win a World Series, and that aspiration is a goal that should hit a serious home run with Yankee fans.
Big Apple Bite Sports 