Baez grins when he thinks of Noely, who was 11 months his junior. He has a picture of her face tattooed on his right shoulder.
"Mi angel," it says in script.
My angel.
One of the biggest reasons he wanted to be a baseball player was so he could take care of her. He's grateful she saw him achieve his dream — their dream, really — when she watched in person as he made his major-league debut in Denver in 2014.
"I was prepared for her to go way before she did," Baez said. "Everything she wanted, she got. She could ride a jet ski, she got a motorcycle. The only thing she couldn't do was walk."
Baez would have fixed that, too, if he could have. When he was 7, his mother heard him tell his sister he wished he could switch legs with her so she would know what it felt like to walk.
"Everything I did in my life, it was because of her," Baez said. "My mom stopped living her life to live my sister's life. She was so big for my family. It was something incredible."