San Diego Padres Minor League Starting Pitcher of the Month - May 2025

[Billy Mock]

The Padres have some solid depth at the top end of their farm, and Henry Baez is one of the many arms that has become a staple within it. Baez has spent plenty of time in the Padres minor league system, where he has developed into one of their most consistent pitching prospects. He joined the organization in 2019 as part of the international signing class out of the Dominican Republic at just the age of 16. Due to COVID, he didn't debut with the organization until 2021 at the Dominican Summer League as an 18-year-old. Since then, he has had a pretty steady rise through the system to where he finds himself now, at Double-A San Antonio at the age of 22. A strong 2024 campaign in which he threw 100+ innings for the first time in his career between High-A Fort Wayne and San Antonio earned him the Padres Minor League Pitcher of the Year award. A year later, he ranks ninth on Padres Mission's top 20 prospects and 12th on MLB Pipeline's Padres top 30 prospects. 

Baez made five starts in the month of May for the San Antonio Missions, three of which were scoreless outings. His first start of the month was a four-inning outing in which he surrendered four runs while striking out just two, but he followed that up with a four-start stretch in which he allowed just one run. In those four starts, Baez posted a 0.43 ERA and a 1.80 ERA for the full month. His best outing of the stretch came on May 22nd against the Wichita Wind Surge, a start in which he delivered 5 2/3 scoreless innings for San Antonio while allowing just three hits and one walk on six strikeouts.  

Baez's ERA in the month of May ranked third among all Texas League pitchers and all qualified Padres Minor League pitchers. On the entire season, his 2.45 ERA, 3.40 FIP, and 1.11 WHIP rank within the top ten among Padres MiLB pitchers with at least 20 innings. 

He hasn't filled up the stat sheet with strikeouts, as he posted a pedestrian 18.0% strikeout rate in the month of May, but more so finds his success through limiting hard contact. He's consistently posting groundball rates above 50 percent — in total, he has a  54.3% groundball rate this year. That mark ranks 21st among the 296 qualified pitchers in all of Minor League Baseball this year. 

Baez features a well-rounded arsenal, and while no pitch is elite by any means, it's a pitch mix that he has great feel for. The velocity on his fastball has steadily climbed since he joined the Padres and currently sits anywhere from the low to mid-90s. His secondaries consist of a high-70s slurve-slider and a mid-80s split-change. The changeup is his put-away pitch (as it earns the most whiffs), while the slider is more of a pitch to keep hitters off balance and induce swings out of the zone. 

Baez's combination of his ability to pitch deeper into games along with an arsenal of pitches tailored to suppress opposing lineups has made him a starter the Padres have targeted as a future back-end rotation option at the big league level. While he just had an impressive month of May, this isn't a new thing for Baez, so keep an eye on him to continue producing at a high level as advances towards the big league roster.

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