On the day his baseball future changed, Akil Baddoo’s computer screen went black.
He was with his father, monitoring Major League Baseball’s Rule 5 draft in December 2020. Baddoo knew he was not on the Minnesota Twins’ 40-man roster, knew baseball’s complex rules meant any other team could select him and give him a chance. A friend texted him a link to an article that listed Baddoo among players who could be selected in the Rule 5 Draft. That’s when the notion of a new team and a new start first felt real.
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Baddoo had spent the better part of two years away from the game he loved. And so just as the Detroit Tigers were up to announce the No. 3 pick in the Rule 5 Draft, Baddoo’s laptop shut off.
The 22-year-old Baddoo raced to restore his connection. And by the time the video reappeared on the screen, Baddoo saw his name. Akil Baddoo, outfielder. In the heat of the moment, Baddoo went insane. He raced around his home, cheering, yelling, cursing. “Holy $%@!”
Akilah, Baddoo’s mother, yelled from another room. “Akil, I’m on a conference call!”
It turned out the celebration was justifiable. As a Rule 5 pick, Baddoo would enter the spring with a real chance to make Detroit’s 26-man active roster. The story on the surface was charming enough. He was a kid from Georgia, from an energetic family where five boys grew up playing and fighting around the house. His mother was strict and intense in the best of ways, his father a little more laid back. He was also a player who missed almost all of 2019 recovering from Tommy John surgery and all of 2020 when COVID-19 shut down baseball’s minor leagues. Now he had a chance to play in the majors.
For Baddoo, the opportunity seemed like a ray of sunlight cracking through an otherwise cavernous two years. There was the surgery and the shutdown. There was also more. On Aug. 4, 2020, Baddoo lost one of his two older brothers. Shaquane John Glore died at age 30. Baddoo called him “the nicest guy in the world,” and he was a young man whose passion for food had him pursuing a career as a chef. Shaquane was engaged to be married, and the future seemed hopeful.
Baddoo and his family want to keep most of the details private, including the circumstances of Shaquane’s death. It’s all deeply personal, something everyone is still grieving, a topic for public conversation only because of the way Akil Baddoo is hitting a baseball.
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Baddoo honors his brother with the initials “LLSJG” in his Twitter bio, and his header photo is a picture of him and Shaquane at Target Field in Minneapolis. Baddoo says he and his brother were close, and the siblings were all pallbearers at Shaquane’s funeral. “I just want to continue to lift his name up,” Baddoo said.
What Baddoo has faced over the past two years goes beyond surgery, beyond a pandemic, beyond a lost baseball season. There were moments, Baddoo says, when he had doubts like anyone else might. Days where he wasn’t sure if the light would ever break through. Times when he wondered about his career, worried for his family, moments when the darkness and the grief became hard to carry.
“It’s been a tough journey,” Baddoo said. “I’ve really learned it’s about enjoying and making the most of what you have. My brother and baseball, society shut down, it was tough, you know?”
The Akil Baddoo we’ve seen on the baseball field — and the one talking now on a video call from up high in a Chicago hotel room, a place no one expected him to be this time a year ago — radiates positivity and good vibes. His path here was not easy. He worked out like a maniac. He trained and honed his swing like a scientist locked in a lab. He obsessed over video, watching footage of Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Willie Mays late into the night. He studied the lives of his heroes and embraced Kobe Bryant’s “mamba mentality.” Baddoo carries a similar drive to prove people wrong, but it is balanced with a certain magnetic energy. Baddoo paraphrases a quote from actor Will Smith: Always lean forward.
On Feb. 12, he posted a picture to his Instagram account, his first appearance in a Tigers uniform. He wrote the caption: “Everything negative — pressure, challenges — is an opportunity for me to rise.”
Look at Akil Baddoo now. He steps up to bat, the iconic melody of “Still D.R.E.” bumping over the Comerica Park speakers. He carries himself with the swagger of an athlete, but some of Baddoo’s on-field persona is a nod to those who came before him. Baddoo says both his mother and father were born in New York, but his paternal grandfather came to the U.S. from Ghana. His mother’s family is from Trinidad. His first name, derived from his mother’s side, means “intelligence.” His middle name, Neomon, is an homage to a family tribe in Ghana.
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Baddoo grew up hearing the stories about his uncles in Ghana, his grandmother’s life in Trinidad. The traditions get passed down, and Baddoo says he loves to tell people about his ancestors and their culture. The food, the music, the hair, the clothes.
“I kind of add it to my own little culture,” he says.
Baddoo has crafted his own style around the lives of those who came before him. He wears a black-beaded necklace that pops out from under his jersey. People often ask him if the necklace is made of black diamonds. “No,” Baddoo laughs, because this is Baddoo, and there’s always a little more to the story.
The necklace comes from the mother of Twins prospect Royce Lewis. A hobby turned into a little business, and the necklaces are called humility chains. A few players in the Twins system wear them. Baddoo’s necklace is part fashion statement, but it’s also a reminder of where he has been and where he comes from.
If you didn’t know better, it might be easy to forget. But before Baddoo homered off his first MLB pitch, before he followed that act with an opposite-field grand slam and then a thrilling walk-off single, he was an injured prospect living in his parents’ basement.
Baddoo was warming up for a game in early May 2019, playing with the High-A Fort Myers Miracle. He was taking in-and-out, and as he threw the ball from the outfield to third base, something in his left throwing arm felt off. When Baddoo fielded a fly ball and fired to home plate, he felt it. Pop. It wasn’t exactly a sharp pain, not really a total numbness, either. It was the type of stomach-churning feeling where you just know: This isn’t good. An MRI later confirmed the worst. A Grade 3 tear in Baddoo’s UCL. That meant Tommy John surgery, months of rehab, at least a year on the injured list.
Soon, the injury sent Baddoo back to Georgia, back to the place that shaped him.
John Baddoo walked into Ransom CrossFit during Akil’s senior year in high school. It was a gym he and his wife had just joined, a fun way to stay in shape. Eventually, John began talking with Ryan Pye, the gym’s founder, a graduate of Baddoo’s high school and a former trainer in the Washington Nationals organization. As Pye recalls, the conversation started something like this:
“Hey,” John said. “I have a son who plays baseball. I’d like for him to start working out.”
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Says Pye now: “He kind of undersold him.”
Baddoo showed up at Ransom CrossFit soon after. His teenage frame was not quite filled out, but he already showed the makings of a freak athlete. Baddoo was a rising MLB draft prospect with a scholarship offer to Kentucky in his back pocket. Baddoo was born in Maryland but the family moved to Conyers, Ga., when he was a toddler. Conyers is a town of 15,195 on the edge of suburban Atlanta, a sort of outpost between two worlds, a last stop before the city gives way to creek beds and Georgia farmland.
Baddoo did not play at a prestigious high school program. His ability gained him exposure in a loaded Georgia prep baseball scene, but he wasn’t viewed in quite the same regard as a few other prospects in the state.
The Minnesota Twins nonetheless drafted Baddoo in the second round of the 2016 MLB Draft with a scouting report that touted his tools and room for development. Baddoo impressed in rookie ball, then hit .243 with solid on-base and slugging numbers in Class A. In 2019, Baddoo played in 29 games before the injury. He hit only .214 with a .290 on-base percentage at the High-A level.
At first, it was difficult to see how he would make the Tigers’ roster. But over the past few weeks, Baddoo has wowed fans and made national highlight reels. A common question: How, exactly, is he doing this?
Listen to the people who watched Baddoo work over a long two-year stretch, and it begins to make a little more sense.
As Baddoo wrote in another post on social media: “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out.”
When Baddoo first returned to Conyers after Tommy John surgery, Ryan Pye was worried.
“That’s a real easy time to be like, ‘Oh man, is baseball gonna work?’” Pye said. “It’s easy to get negative on that kind of stuff. The odds, they’re already stacked against you.”
Then, on Badoo’s first day back at Ransom CrossFit, Pye watched as Baddoo came in with a smile, then turned stone-cold serious and went to work.
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“He’s a positive guy. He’s fun to be around,” Pye said. “All that stuff was still there. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna bounce back from this.’”
Pye works largely with adults in their 30s or older, but with Baddoo he helped supervise more individualized training, based on programs the Twins’ strength staff sent along. Pye watched as Baddoo slowly rehabbed his left arm. It was four months before he could swing, six months before he could throw. The time away, paired with the quarantine period that ensued, allowed Baddoo to strengthen the rest of his body in a way he might not have been able to otherwise. Baddoo got bigger and stronger, more flexible and more durable.
“It sounds bad, but it gave him time not to worry about baseball,” Pye said.
Pye said the goal was to tune Baddoo’s body, so when it comes time to hit, “it sounds like a bomb went off.” He also called Baddoo “a mutant.” The natural gifts, though, are only part of the equation.
After surgery, it took time for Baddoo to regain feeling in his left fingers, particularly the pinky. He did small rehab exercises, and now he laughs, talking about how strong those fingers have become.
Because of the surgery, Baddoo says he has to prepare like a two-way player, caring for his arm like a pitcher. He also learned how his lower half impacts what happens with his arm. That all amounts to why he does not leave any detail overlooked.
“I’ve worked with pro baseball players before as a strength coach, and I’ve worked with other athletes outside of that,” Pye said. “Akil is probably in the top three that show up, get there early and spend maybe 30, 45 minutes doing basic prep on the boring, stupid mobilizing things that strength coaches always try to get people to do. It isn’t the sexy lifting weights or running sprints.
“Once I saw him really dig into that and take that serious, I had a feeling like, ‘OK, if he can stay healthy, this is really gonna be a kid that can be super special.’”
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Baddoo spent nearly every day honing his body. Just as importantly, he learned to quiet his mind. He spent too many days with little to do other than play “Call of Duty,” work out and worry over an uncertain future. Baddoo took up yoga, and he also adopted meditation, an interest that comes from some of his family members.
Baddoo says he finds it calming to sit cross-legged and listen to meditation sounds, a way to quiet his mind from the storm.
Jay Hood had already learned plenty about Akil Baddoo. Hood — a former Angels draft pick who now operates The Hood ATL baseball facility in the Atlanta area — began working with Baddoo after the 2018 season. Hood at first saw an unpolished high-school hitter adjusting to the finer points of the pro game. “I could tell the athleticism he possessed, but he was also very honest about his baseball history and where he came from,” Hood said.
Hood watched and worked as Baddoo started to develop, and he also helped Baddoo through Tommy John surgery, eventually ramping up for a 2020 season that never came.
“It’s about how you react to it,” Baddoo said of two years away from the game. “Am I gonna sit there and stay negative, or am I gonna overcome it?”
After the shutdown, Baddoo and Hood dialed their work back to the basics. They obsessed over the minutiae of a swing. Top-hand drills, then bottom hand. They focused on extension, and handling the inside pitch. There was a drill where Hood set a tee up in the middle part of the plate, then fed Baddoo pitches on the inner half. Baddoo had to square up the ball without his bat hitting the tee, a way to train his muscles to execute a tight and compact swing, the kind that can get around on a major-league fastball.
Hood loves to dive into the nitty-gritty of hitting. He’ll talk about Baddoo’s posture, his lower-half foundation, his natural eye and plate discipline, and how he can tell if a hitter is ready by the way they take pitches outside the strike zone. But this past summer also provided Hood a window into some of the things that really make Baddoo tick.
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In the days after Shaquane’s death, Hood knew Baddoo was dealing with a family tragedy. “He’s been through more adversity than most young men his age,” Hood says. He also watched as Baddoo kept coming to work, perhaps as focused as ever. There was a drive to be great, and then there was the other side: cage work as therapy, a way to unwind a period of confusion and frustration.
“I think this goes into his character,” Hood said. “He came in to train on a day there was a tragic loss, and you knew something was off, but he was there. He was at work. And you don’t see that.”
If Shaquane’s death was a tentpole moment in the life of Akil Baddoo, another came the day the laptop went black, when Baddoo called Hood and said he would have to reschedule that night’s hitting session. There were logistics to take care of as Baddoo became a Detroit Tiger. There was also some celebrating to do.
“He was kinda pissed,” Baddoo says of Hood.
In reality, Hood was thrilled for his young client. They spent the rest of the winter preparing for the biggest challenge of Baddoo’s baseball career. As he departed for spring training, Hood left him with this:
“Hey man, remember who you are, don’t try to do too much, be seen, not heard, and deal with the adversity. You’re gonna go up there and there’s gonna be some point where you get your teeth kicked in a little bit. But just keep grinding, keep doing what you do, and things will work out.”
When Baddoo’s April 5 grand slam off Twins pitcher Randy Dobnak cleared the fence, Bobby Link sent Baddoo a text: “Looks like I owe you two steaks.”
Baddoo’s coach at Salem High School and also a former farmhand in the Tigers organization, Link used to buy players a steak dinner if they hit an opposite-field home run.
Link says he knew Baddoo was a special talent the first time he saw him take batting practice. But again, how in the world is Baddoo doing … this?
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“Sometimes,” Link said, “all it takes is an opportunity.”
Baddoo spent the early days of the 2021 season as a national storyline, seemingly providing a new thrill every day. Among a long list of accolades and overly specific superlatives: Baddoo is the only player in the past 120 years to have four doubles, three triples and four home runs within the first 17 games of his career.
And nowhere is Baddoo getting more buzz than his Georgia hometown.
Tim Allen is the principal at Grace Christian Academy, where Baddoo’s two younger brothers attend school. When Baddoo was in high school he was dual enrolled and played baseball at Salem while taking his math and science courses at Grace Christian, with Allen serving as a tutor and mentor. Baddoo says he was an A-B student, but his parents wanted him to take advantage of what they viewed as a better education. Allen’s review matches up with the coaches who watched Baddoo lift weights and hit baseballs.
“He put his nose to the grindstone,” Allen said.
Allen grew into a sort of spiritual adviser for Baddoo. They talk about faith, about maintaining a moral compass, about hopes and gains and grief and loss. Speaking about Baddoo, Allen quotes scripture: “And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”
Recently, Allen has found himself tracking Tigers games on his phone, finding a stream of the radio call and tuning in whenever Baddoo is at the plate. At one point in Baddoo’s early hot streak, Allen texted: “I’m proud of you not just as a player. I’m proud to watch you grow up as a man.”
At Ransom CrossFit, about 20 people gathered around as Pye had a Tigers game on TV. They delayed the start of a workout to see Baddoo bat, and when he homered, Pye says the place practically erupted. He thought back to the days before spring training, when Baddoo seemed totally calm approaching a potentially life-changing opportunity.
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“He understood that it was going to be a challenge, but at the same time he’s not someone who backs down from that,” Pye said. “The best athletes in the world, they have to have that headspace. They have to think, ‘I am good enough to do what I’m gonna do,’ or you’re never gonna succeed. He’s not arrogant in any way, but at the same time, he walks around with a swagger and a confidence because every room he’s ever walked into, he has deserved to be there and demonstrated it.
“It’s playing it out like I’m sure in his head the whole time he always thought it was going to.”
He has captivated Conyers and gained a national following. He has also become arguably the most exciting athlete in a city starving for sports success. Tigers fans coo Baddoo’s name as he steps to the plate. Fans have custom-ordered his No. 60 jersey, and they clamor online anytime Baddoo isn’t in the lineup.
“I think the baseball gods are rewarding him for his mindset, his maturity, the way he goes about coming to work every day,” Hood said. “He is a true professional, and you don’t run across that with too many 22-year-olds or even guys in their 20s. You just knew, once you started getting to know him, ‘Hey, this guy’s different.’”
Baseball, of course, is a game where the challenges never relent. We’ve seen flash-in-the-pan sensations before. Baddoo has four home runs and a .662 slugging percentage. But his batting average has also tumbled quickly, down to .241. Baddoo has struck out in an alarming 42.6 percent of his plate appearances, as opposing pitchers learn more about Baddoo’s tendencies.
Every day comes with lessons, from running out a near-home-run ball to interacting with umpires. Baddoo is adjusting to the travel, to the grind, to the millions of little things that go on beyond hitting. But even as he has cooled off, Baddoo is still finding ways to thrill: A leadoff triple in the ninth inning against the Royals, a batting helmet that flies off as he rounds the bases, the perfect blend of style and substance to resonate in a place like Detroit.
Tigers manager A.J. Hinch has taken the Baddoo Experience in stride. The key to managing Baddoo as the lessons keep coming?
“Let Akil be Akil,” Hinch said. “Let the helmet fly off. Let him run down balls in the outfield. Let him take big swings because when he connects, it can be electrifying.”
There are layers to Akil Baddoo. The strutting confidence we see on the field. The competitiveness and obsessive work ethic, forged both by his upbringing and too much time away from the game he loves. There’s also the earnest smile and easygoing nature, a joyous heart that has him defying the odds and having fun doing it.
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There is also a more reflective side to Akil Baddoo, who is not taking this wild ride and whatever the future may hold for granted. “A dream come true,” he has said over and over.
Before every plate appearance, Baddoo strides outside the left-handed batter’s box, flips around his bat and looks down. With the handle of his bat, he draws two lines. A cross. He says it’s an ode to his faith, a reminder of his blessings, a way to honor his late brother and others who came before him.
The surgery, the layoff, the loss. All these moments shaped him. They are all reasons he is here now, amazing the baseball world a little more every day.
(Top photo: Courtesy of the Detroit Tigers)
