CBS 58's Hometown Athlete: Blake Baker, baseball miracle
CBS 58 MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- A summer night. Kids playing. And Blake Baker is right in the middle of the action.
CBS 58 Sports Director Lance Allan asks, "You only lost one game all year?"
"Yeah," Blake Baker says. "How does that happen?" Allan asks.
Watching him, you’d never know he had a walk-off win. In life.
"He's laughing by the time he's in the dugout because there's bigger things," Blake's dad, Eric Baker, says. "When he's pitchin', if a kid hits it, okay, the kid hit it. That's part of life."
"When he's playing, he's a great leader," Coach Eddie Gilgenbach says. "He's a great kid, but you watch him play and there's really no thought about it."
Shortly after 2024 began, Blake developed a headache. It quickly became much worse.
"I just remember seeing the ladies behind the glass window," Blake's mom, Rebecca Baker, says. "Picking up the phones and start calling people. And I knew right away something wasn't right. And I would say within five minutes of that CT scan, we had one of the neurosurgeons in the room with us saying, your son needs to go into emergency brain surgery, and you need to sign this piece of paper. If you don't sign it, he will die."
"There's just a million thoughts because you just, he was literally going for a headache," Eric Baker says. "And next thing you know, he's being wheeled away, screaming, 'Mom, dad! Mom, dad!'"
"They called us pretty urgently," Dr. Elsa Arocho-Quinones says.
Doctors at the Children's Wisconsin Emergency Department rushed into action. He had a benign tumor and fluid on the brain.
"We knew this needed to happen right away," Children's Wisconsin Pediatric Neurosurgeon Dr. Elsa Arocho-Quinones says. "So we just moved. He got his scan before he was out of the table from the scanner. They called us and they let us know this was happening. So, we met them at imaging. And we moved them from there to the operating room."
"There's something in my brain that blocked fluid," Blake Baker says. "Then I couldn't play baseball after the surgery."
Good thing. Because if there would have been a few minutes delay…
"Or if we had waited five more minutes," Rebecca Baker says, "He wouldn't be here today."
Are there routine exams? Sure. But watch Blake and tell me he’s not a breathing, baseball playing miracle.
CBS 58 Sports Director Lance Allan asks, "And I see the laugh...like, is that true?"
"Yeah, no, from this kind of surgery?" Dr. Elsa Arocho-Quinones says. "And the approach that we use, which was like less invasive than most, like I'm not surprised about that at all. And that he just continues to thrive."
"You wouldn't be able to pick him out from any other kid because he's doing so well athletically and academically," Rebecca Baker says.
"Often times we forget a lot of what kids can go through," Eddie Gilgenbach says. "And he's still growing up. And he's been through a harder, you know, point in his life than a lot of us can ever imagine. And he comes out here and he's ripping the ball. He's pitching, you know, really tight games and doing an awesome job, as if it never happened."
His Cedarburg U-9 team ranked number one in the state. But let’s just say Blake is winning at life.
"If people watch you play the game, they'd never know anything happened to you, would they?"
"Nope," Blake Baker says.
"Because you play all out?"
"Uh huh," Blake Baker says.
"Baseball has brought us all together," Eddie Gilgenbach says. "And it's something where I can't thank him enough."
"We're glad we have him every day," Rebecca Baker says. "It's such a blessing to watch him playing baseball and hanging out with his friends and doing all the things that he loves to do."
