The final month of a baseball season isn’t about the limelight. It’s about the floodlight. The most imperative at-bats of the season are coming, and everyone’s name is on the roll. Hiding in the far corner in the dugout is not an option.
The following players are among those who have greeted the exposure like a long-lost letter from home. There will be others.
Jake Bauers, Milwaukee
Bauers came to the majors in 2018, at age 22. Right on time, in his mind. He made his debut for Tampa Bay and hit 100 mph on his first three fair balls. All were caught by Seattle Mariners. It was the first hint that this big-league stuff might be a little complicated.
Last Saturday, Bauers squared off against Atlanta lefthander Martin Perez. He lengthened the plate appearance to 12 pitches, including seven consecutive foul balls. The 13th landed over the left-center fence in Milwaukee’s ballpark.
In between, Bauers has been a frustrated nomad, going to Seattle, Cleveland Cincinnati and the Yankees in search of whatever it was that made him a Top 50 prospect. Three years into his Milwauee tenure, Bauers has tracked down that answer and bottled it. He has 23 homers and 75 RBIs, along with 70 walks and an .884 OPS. All are career-highs for the 30-year-old, as are 119 games and a .501 slugging percentage. He is the most consistent hitter on the best regular-season team in baseball.
Bauers credits it almost solely to a brain flip. At some point over the past two years he surveyed his life, deemed it good, and decided to quit defining it by whatever was happening at the plate. He said he had been preoccupied with hitting and sticking as a major league player. Having two kids might have jostled that preoccupation. Now he puts his baseball day in one compartment and puts his personal day in another. Along with concentrating on hitting baseballs instead of swinging the bat and getting hung up on all the technicalities within, it seems to have worked.
Bauers is striking out only 25.6 percent of the time, as opposed to 35 percent in 2023 with the Yankees. He also is hitting to the opposite field more often than he has since 2021. It’s part of the Brewers’ contact-first philosophy, but Bauers has so far reached his best home run-rate as well.
One of the Brewers’ many mascots is Barrelman, a guy who looks like he’s either swallowed a barrel or spent a year in one of Milwaukee’s saloons. Bauers’ 2-year-old daughter Marlie doesn’t like Barrelman, the mascot, but she’s started calling her dad Barrelman, which goes nicely with the part of the bat he’s been using. Naturally the T-shirts followed. Bauers, who is making $2.7 million this year, can be a free agent next season. To most people, that would mean a lot of cash on the barrelhead. To Bauers, it means his first multi-year contract.
Mickey Gasper, Boston
It’s one of those charmed seasons in Boston, in which every prospect in a Red Sox uniform hits the win-a-free-suit sign in centerfield and then buys a winning Powerball ticket. The latest is Gasper, son of New England and, richly, a reject from the Yankees.
In 2024, Gasper got a 13-game cup of coffee with the Red Sox and spilled it on those home whites, going 0-for-18. Last year he hit .158 in 45 games for Minnesota. But in August the Fenway fans have learned to wait for his at-bats, rather than hitting the chowder station. Gasper is 10-for-24 this month with five home runs and only one strikeout. He will make his presence felt sometime during a four-game home series with the Yankees, beginning Friday night, the type of epic that Christopher Nolan might direct.
Gasper is from Merrimack, N.H., one of 10 Granite Staters to ever play in the big leagues since 2000. He wound up at Bryant College in Rhode Island, and turned heads in the summer Cape Cod League with his live bat and his teammate skills. The Yankees took him in the 27th round, when the scouts are looking at notes they’d scribbled on napkins, and left him unprotected in the Rule V draft. And even though he did enough to surface with Boston, the Red Sox dealt him to Minnesota. The Twins cast him aside this winter, and Washington picked him up, figuratively shook him for a minute, and sent him back into the pool. Boston took Gasper off waivers and figured he’d help Worcester win a few Triple-A games. The manager there was Chad Tracy.
Gasper was always enough of a by-the-book guy that he wore a sport coat to Fenway when the Red Sox called him up in 2024. Then-manager Alex Cora said that was a first for him. Cora was fired this year when the Red Sox lost 17 of their first 27. Tracy took over on a strictly interim basis which, considering the way Boston was playing, was probably fine. He had a vacancy when Masataka Yoshida got hurt, and he knew Gasper. Maybe he didn’t know the Gasper who could digest a major league month with one bite, but Boston has a 63-43 record since the manager change.
“Mickey’s got the best mustache in baseball, straight out of Jersey Shore,” said Tracy, who is hoping his gig becomes just as indelible.
Derek Hill, Philadelphia
They say pitchers eventually catch up with hitters, but does the mail ever catch up with Hill?
Since Detroit sent him packing in 2022, Hill has been with Washington, Texas, San Francisco, Miami, the White Sox and now the Phillies. He has paid taxes in seven states and he’s only 30.
In none of those places did Hill play more than 57 games.
It could have been traumatic if Hill hadn’t had a father who was in no mood for sob stories. Orsino Hill played 12 minor league seasons for seven different organizations. Like Derek, he was a first-round draft pick which, as he discovered, becomes a deactivated key upon delivery. As Orsino told Derek, “If you’ve never been through anything in life, the minor leagues will absolutely chew you up and spit you out.”
Derek has borne a few tooth marks over the years, but his desire makes him difficult to swallow. He was biding his time with the White Sox on June 11 when the Phillies traded two minor leaguers for him. Little did he know he would become the toast of a town that is more inclined to burn.
On June 23 Hill launched a 2-run, pinch-hit home run to beat Washington. The next night he had another homer to lengthen the Phillies’ lead in a 10-5 win. On Aug. 3 Hill hit a grand slam as the Phillies came from behind to beat the Nationals, 6-3, and he also made a diving catch in centerfield. But that didn’t come close to duplicating his leap at the wall to retrieve Juan Soto’s first-inning home run bid on June 25, one that helped the Phillies get past the Mets, 2-1, and brought a rare smile to pitcher Zack Wheeler.
Like the Red Sox, the Phillies stalled out when the bell rang, and were 9–19 when manager Rob Thomson was fired. Futility isn’t tolerated in Philly, but lifelessness is an original sin, and the Phillies played older than their birth certificates. Adolis Garcia, who came in to solve the Phillies’ outfield weaknesses, wasn’t the answer, and later got hurt, as did Johan Rojas. Hence the urgency to get Hill. They knew he could hit lefthand pitchers and run down fly balls, but as the Phillies began to drag themselves into contention, they needed his unadulterated joy. They won 16 of their next 20 and are pushing Atlanta for the N.L. East lead.
Orsino is from L.A., scouts for the Dodgers and is Darryl Strawberry’s cousin, and over the years he would recruit acquaintances like Barry Bonds to assess young Derek. But Derek was born in Des Moines, and he became the first Iowa native to play in the Field Of Dreams game when the Phillies met the Twins, which meant he got to walk through the cornfield that lies beyond the fence. He’s conquered deeper underbrush than that.
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