Bronx, NY – Javier Baéz finally received his 2018 National League LatinoMVP award this last Tuesday. The award was supposed to be given to Baéz during the 2019 baseball season. Our awards are always given the year after as to not get mixed up with the regular annual awards given like Cy Young, MVP, Rookie of the Year, etc.
Apparently, there was a serious lack of communication as Baéz never received our correspondence sent to him and the Chicago Cubs during Spring Training. We never heard back from anyone. In the 31 years giving these awards which are the oldest and most prestigious awards given to Latino baseball players, we have always heard back from the winning players team, his agent or in as in a few cases, the players themselves.
We held the award and in July 2019 we met with Baéz at the Cleveland All Star game. We told him about the award that he had won. He was both surprised and appreciative and asked his agent to meet with us and get the award to him preferably in front of his fans in Chicago. Again, unfortunately, his agent was not able to keep his promise of getting the Cubs to reach out to us to give the award to Baéz. As such the award remained in our storage until last Tuesday when we were finally able to get the award to the Mets Media who presented the award to Baéz in the Mets Clubhouse.
Sometimes one must believe that things happen for a reason. So perhaps Javier Baéz was not supposed to receive this prestigious award in 2019. Apparently, he was supposed to receive this past Tuesday 2021 when he probably needed to get some love and support from his community after a world wind situation with the whole “thumbs down” misunderstanding. A misunderstanding that Baéz and Lindor apologized to the fans, but that many in the Latino community believed that he received unfair attacks from the Anglo sports press. The award could not have come at a better time.
