Behind the rise of Giants rookie Patrick Bailey: Hes blown away all expectations

The Giants were on a flight to Minnesota in late May when Alex Cobb noticed something unusual about a young teammate.

It was Patrick Bailey’s first flight as a big leaguer. But he wasn’t wolfing down his second meal. He hadn’t touched the beverage cart. His tray table wasn’t festooned with candy wrappers. He wasn’t part of the group noisily playing cards. He wasn’t watching a movie.

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“Everybody enjoys their first flight,” Cobb said. “I mean, it’s anything you want. You’re celebrating the fact you’re there. You’re drinking with your buddies. But you walk by and he’s studying the scouting reports for the next series.”

Bailey is a quick study. He’s barely two months into his career as a major-league catcher yet he’s already carved out a lasting place at the position. He has made an impact with his throwing, blocking and framing. He’s calling pitches with the cool assurance of a veteran who has spent years breaking down the swings and tendencies of big-league hitters. He has won universal acclaim from a seasoned pitching staff.

Maybe it seems like it happened overnight. It didn’t. Bailey began preparing for this role ever since he was a second grader growing up in Greensboro, N.C. And his major-league success isn’t a surprise to the coaches from his youth who kept layering more and more responsibilities on him because he never met a challenge that he could not handle.

“He just had a knack for catching the baseball,” said Scott Bankhead, a former big-league pitcher who runs the North Carolina Baseball Academy that Bailey began attending as an 8-year-old. “Patrick’s wanted to be a major-league catcher his whole life. He played other positions but by 12 or 13, he was catching exclusively. I would have him catching kids throwing over 80 mph when he was 12. And he kept progressing to the point where he could catch anybody.”

Including big-league reliever Yimi Garcia. Bailey guesses he was 12, maybe 13, when Garcia stopped by the facility for a side session.

“It was a cool thing for me — first big leaguer I caught,” Bailey said. “I remember catching him and thinking, ‘Damn, this guy’s pretty good.’ He was probably in the mid-90s. I’m pretty sure I missed his first slider. But after that, it was OK.”

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Bankhead would have to assuage the concerns of a visiting coach or player when they’d see this scrawny, junior high kid get behind the plate.

“Just throw like you usually do — it’ll be fine,” Bankhead would say.

“And that’s the thing. It always was,” Bankhead said. “It’s been awesome to watch him go through his career step by step. I tell people all the time: it’s one of my most unique things in 25 years of coaching. Patrick would ask me every year, starting around 14, what I thought he needed to do to be a big-league catcher. I’d have to remind him, ‘You don’t need to be a big leaguer today. You need to be 14 years old.’ But he worked on it. He was a sponge for it. That’s always been his focus.”

When Bailey first began working with Bankhead, his parents were so committed to his baseball instruction that they moved to a house that was within a mile of the facility. They almost treated Bailey like a child actor. He was home-schooled. His life revolved around baseball. The lessons weren’t merely a means to a scholarship or a way to have fun with friends in the fresh air. It was vocational training.

There wasn’t a doubt where Bailey would attend high school. Wesleyan Christian Academy won the state championship in 2008 and 2010 and counted major-league slugger Wil Myers among its alumni. Their coach at the time, Scott Davis, already knew Bailey well. Davis’ son was on several summer ball teams with Bailey. Davis knew he was getting a smart and skilled catcher. But Bailey also presented a conundrum.

“We had a senior catcher at the time and a junior who was pretty good, and Patrick was a freshman,” Davis said. “But Patrick was a prodigy. I’d gotten to spend a little time with him and I could tell he was off the charts mentally. He was totally different in his understanding of the game. He was little, but he was on another level when it came to receiving, blocking and calling a game.”

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So Davis devised a competition. He had his pitchers throw to all three catchers over a four-week period. Then he brought each of the pitchers into his office for an individual meeting. He asked them which catcher they preferred.

“And it was not even close,” Davis said with a laugh. “They didn’t even know Patrick. But that’s how quickly they felt comfortable with him. So I told my assistant coach we’ll start Patrick as a freshman.”

That wasn’t all.

“I never had a catcher call pitches before,” Davis said. “We let him do that from the start. My assistant coach pitched D1 ball. I told him, ‘Patrick is going to be our pitching coach. You oversee him, check with him between innings, but we’re going to let him do what he wants to do.'”

There’s a famous story that Davis tells about The Book. As James Fegan described it in his draft-day feature on Bailey in 2020, the book “was and is an exhaustive compendium of all Wesleyan’s defensive assignments, bunt coverages, relay alignments, signs and signals; everything a catcher would need to command a defense, and probably a fair bit more.” Bailey asked for it three months before his freshman season started. There was just one problem: Davis hadn’t written it yet.

“So three weeks later I got the book done and gave it to Patrick,” Davis said. “He wanted to get a head start.”

Bailey hasn’t stopped studying since then. And the big leagues is the ultimate data-driven candy store. The more Giants coaches give him, the more he absorbs. Catching in the big leagues is more mentally demanding than ever. The rabbit hole is endless when it comes to heat maps, pitch shapes and probability models. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bailey has adapted so well as a big-league rookie. In the low minors, where pitchers aren’t as precise and umpires are learning on the job (there were just six of them, of varying skill, in the entire Northwest League when he was at High-A Eugene), Bailey’s attention to detail behind the plate might have been less impactful.

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In the big leagues, it’s showing up every night.

“He’s blown away all expectations,” said Cobb, “and we had pretty high expectations for him.”

Bailey has caught 14 of 40 attempted base stealers, which doesn’t begin to describe the impact he has had on the opposition’s running game. Before Washington’s Lane Thomas swiped four bases Sunday at Nationals Park, Bailey’s success rate was nearly double the major-league average. It’s even more impressive when you watch a compendium of those thwarted thieveries. Bailey has thrown out the Mets’ Starling Marte, the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts, the Padres’ Fernando Tatis, Jr. and the Reds’ Elly De La Cruz. And he has done it from a variety of arm angles. He has thrown out four runners on sliders, three on changeups, one on a wild Camilo Doval cutter that might have just as easily rattled to the backstop. He’s thrown out two runners at third base while angling a throw past a right-handed batter lunging in front of him on a bunt attempt.

Patrick Bailey, San Francisco Giants.

Showcases a low 3/4 arm slot.

Adapt. pic.twitter.com/D71eV8LwPH

— Tyler Goodro (@goodrocatching) July 23, 2023

Bailey’s average time on throws to second base is 1.87 seconds. Only Phillies All-Star catcher J.T. Realmuto has been quicker this season. Bailey ranks just ahead of Realmuto and is tied for third overall with an average exchange of 0.61 seconds. His average arm strength ranks in the upper third. And he has been more accurate than an Olympic archer on throws to second base — an especially impressive skill given the improvisational nature of his throwing mechanics.

Bailey never wanted to be known as a catcher who calls fastballs so that he has a better chance of throwing a runner out. So he practiced how to get rid of the ball quickly no matter where he received a pitch.

“That’s something I’ve always tried to take pride in is being able to throw off different pitches,” Bailey said. “I want the pitchers to know when someone gets on base, we’re not just throwing fastballs. We’re pitching. We’re executing our plan.”

Bailey has a say in that plan. He didn’t stop calling his own game at North Carolina State and even the veterans like Cobb on the Giants staff, who can use PitchCom to signal every pitch, have learned to trust their young catcher when he sees something different.

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The moment that sticks with Logan Webb happened in a June 23 game against the Diamondbacks in San Francisco. Christian Walker was at the plate and Bailey called for an inside two-seam fastball.

“On the scouting reports, two-seam in is not a good pitch to that guy,” Webb said. “But he called it 2-2. I shook him off and threw slider. Then he called it again. And I’m like, ‘OK, he’s seeing something I’m not. I’m going to go with this.’ I threw it and he hit a pop fly to right field. He saw him looking over the plate and thought we could get one in on his hands. And he was right.”

That part isn’t in the Wesleyan book or the Giants’ reams of scouting reports. It’s the intuition to read a hitter in the moment, take off the mental training wheels that the scouting reports exist to provide, and improvise within the flow of the game. It’s the human element that a certain recently retired Giants catcher named Buster Posey understood and implemented so well as he piloted the franchise to three World Series titles.

Bailey credited his time at the alternate site during the 2020 season with helping him understand the Giants’ pitching philosophy. It was like an advanced placement course in pitch tunneling, mechanics, pitch design and understanding not just what the scouting reports say about opposing hitters but the why behind them. When you understand why, you’re able to think in three dimensions.

Bailey wasn’t much of a chess player. But he noticed Sean Manaea and a few other pitchers in the Giants clubhouse pondering over a board in the clubhouse. He wanted to engage with his pitchers. He also wanted another avenue into understanding how they thought. So he learned how to play.

He’s already pretty good when it comes to playing the chess match between the lines.

“The Christian Walker example, I noticed earlier in the series he was looking to go the other way,” Bailey said. “There’s damage in. But if you get it in there, there’s also a little bit of chase and weak contact. And Arizona is a really good two-strike hitting team. They don’t punch out a lot. So let’s not pitch for strikeouts. Especially with runners on base, it’s a good time to try to jam him and get weak contact.”

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That’s exactly how it played out.

“Don’t tell them this, but catchers in general are pretty smart,” Webb said, smiling. “And (Bailey) is one of the better ones I’ve played with.”

Pitchers will always pay compliments to teammates who steal them strikes. Even though Bailey didn’t debut until May 19, his pitch framing has been worth 7 runs, according to Statcast — the third most among major-league catchers. The two guys ahead of him on the list, Austin Hedges and Jonah Heim, have caught hundreds more pitches this season.

There’s enough data on framing at the collegiate level for major-league scouting staffs to evaluate those skills in the draft. The Giants had plenty of information about Bailey’s physical tools. But they also had something even more important. Amateur scouting director Michael Holmes lived 15 minutes from Bankhead’s facility. Holmes had monitored Bailey’s progress from almost the beginning. He understood the intelligence and the intangibles. And in a draft held in the midst of a global pandemic and a canceled college baseball season, those were often the most difficult attributes to assess when putting together a draft board.

“I’ve seen Patrick grow into a real leader, a very confident player who believes in himself,” said Holmes, shortly after taking Bailey with the 13th pick in the first round. “I’ve seen him go from a very talented high school player to a two-time Team USA player and the leader of that team at N.C. State. I’ve seen his skill set really, really take off.”

As Giants president Farhan Zaidi explained last month, catchers remain among the most difficult players to evaluate as amateurs.

“The totality of your defensive impact at the catching position, so much of it comes from your ability to manage the staff and manage the game,” Zaidi said. “And all these guys on their high school and college teams are leaders and alphas, you know? It’s really when you get into pro ball and truly at the big-league level that you know. Because basically everybody catching in the big leagues was considered a leader at some point. But we know there are varying degrees. So that’s been really impressive.

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“Everything that we saw from him as an amateur has really translated all the way up to the top of profile at the major-league level. Obviously, the endorsements he gets from our pitching staff are a big deal. His ability to control the run game has been really, really impressive. And it’s been good seeing what he’s done offensively, too. We talked about how that would be gravy, but it hasn’t been. It’s really mattered to this team. He’s gotten some really big hits for us. He’s shown enough in this stretch where we really believe that he’s going to be hitting in the five or six hole on a really good team and be impactful that way as well.”

Scott Davis and Wil Myers played golf a few weeks ago and couldn’t stop talking about Bailey’s big-league success. They didn’t take anything for granted. They knew the development of a major-league player is the furthest thing from an exact science. But they can’t say they’re surprised, either.

Davis went fly fishing in Montana last month. When he connected in the Dallas airport, the Giants game was on in one of the sports bars. Davis thought back to that freshman catcher who was ready to start for the varsity before anyone expected. The same thing occurred to Davis now as it did then.

“It’s amazing how comfortable he looks back there,” he said.

(Photo: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire via Associated Press)

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