Liam Hendriks
"A pitcher from the world's most isolated major city who survived cancer and is still not finished"
At 37, Hendriks is pitching in the Arizona Complex League—a circuit typically populated by teenagers on their first professional contracts—making another bid for a return to the majors after cancer treatment. Most careers would have ended years before this one.
Hendriks' current assignment to the ACL Cubs makes him almost certainly the oldest active player in that league, a fact that reframes the entire arc of a career that has already survived a cancer diagnosis and multiple reinventions. The question of whether he can get back to the major leagues is genuinely open.
The dominant narrative about Hendriks is built around his late-career emergence as an elite closer. What receives less attention is where he started: Perth, Western Australia, a city that produces almost no professional baseball players and offers no development infrastructure remotely comparable to what American prospects take for granted.
Perth, Western Australia—where Hendriks was born—is often described as the most geographically isolated major city in the world. There is no regional baseball academy, no established pipeline to professional baseball, and no domestic equivalent of the development systems that funnel talent toward professional leagues in Japan or the United States. Hendriks built his career without that infrastructure. For Japanese fans who grew up in a culture where baseball pathways are clearly defined from childhood through high school koshien tournaments and professional scouting, the degree of improvisation his career required may be difficult to fully appreciate.
When Australian athletes discuss their path to baseball, American observers tend to treat it as a charming origin story. What gets missed is the structural reality: Australia has no high school baseball in the American sense, no college baseball circuit, no showcase culture, and historically no MLB academies within the country. Players who reach the major leagues from Australia have typically done so through international combines or the national team program—a path with no domestic equivalent to the American system that quietly guides prospects from Little League through the draft. Hendriks did not benefit from a pipeline. He found one.
Liam Hendriks was born in Perth, Western Australia—a city closer to Singapore than to Sydney, with almost no infrastructure connecting it to professional baseball. He made his MLB debut in 2011, spent years as a journeyman, and eventually became one of the most dominant closers in the American League. In early 2022, he publicly disclosed a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosis, returned to pitch that same year, and is now, at 37, working his way through the Arizona Complex League in yet another comeback attempt.
| Year | Team | G | W–L | ERA | IP | SO | WHIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | BOS | 14 | 0–2 | 6.59 | 13.2 | 12 | 1.39 |
| 2023 | CHW | 5 | 2–0 | 5.40 | 5.0 | 3 | 1.00 |
| 2022 | CHW | 58 | 4–4 | 2.81 | 57.2 | 85 | 1.04 |
| Career | — | 490 | 33–36 | 3.88 | 663.2 | 739 | 1.20 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
From Perth to the Mound
Perth sits on Australia's southwestern coast, separated from the country's eastern population centers by roughly 2,700 to 3,500 kilometers of largely uninhabited continent. There are no overland highways connecting Perth to Sydney or Melbourne in any practical sense. The city functions, in many ways, more like an island metropolis than a regional hub, which has historically shaped its sports culture and its connection to the wider world. When Liam Hendriks was born there on February 10, 1989, professional baseball had essentially no presence in the city. The dominant sports were Australian Rules football and cricket, both of which commanded the kinds of cultural attention that baseball never has in Western Australia. That Hendriks made it to the major leagues at all is partly a function of timing—the slow, steady expansion of MLB scouting into the Southern Hemisphere that began to accelerate in the 1990s and 2000s—and partly a function of talent that managed to surface in the absence of any system designed to find it. He debuted for the Minnesota Twins on September 6, 2011, becoming part of a small cohort of Australian-born pitchers to reach the highest level of the sport.
The Long Road to Oakland
Hendriks spent the better part of a decade cycling through organizations. He pitched for the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Kansas City Royals before landing with the Oakland Athletics, where his career took its decisive turn. The transition from starter to reliever to closer is a familiar trajectory in baseball, but Hendriks navigated it with unusual persistence. By the time he emerged as one of the American League's most effective late-inning pitchers in Oakland, he was already well into his thirties—an age at which most players who had not yet established themselves would have drifted out of the game. Multiple All-Star selections followed, along with recognition as the league's top closer. He later signed with the Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox. The distance traveled from Perth to the top of a major league bullpen—in terms of geography, infrastructure, and career duration—remains one of the more unusual journeys in recent baseball history.
For readers outside Australia, Perth's isolation can be difficult to internalize. The city is separated from Sydney by roughly the same distance as New York is from Los Angeles—but there is no Route 66 connecting them, no chain of cities, and no practical overland route. Perth's nearest Australian neighbor of any size is Adelaide, more than 2,700 kilometers away. It is genuinely closer to Singapore and Jakarta than to Sydney or Melbourne. This is not a rhetorical flourish. It shapes the city's sense of distance from global institutions, from media attention, and from the development systems—sporting and otherwise—that are more accessible on the eastern seaboard.
A Public Diagnosis
In January 2022, Hendriks publicly disclosed that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The announcement received widespread coverage, and the baseball world's response reflected both the affection he had accumulated and the relative rarity of such disclosures from active players at the peak of their careers. He underwent treatment and returned to pitch that same season—a fact that was, in itself, extensively documented. He was 32 at the time of the diagnosis. The combination of his stature in the game, the public nature of his disclosure, and his subsequent return gave the story an unusual continuity that most athletic health narratives do not sustain. His career since 2022 has unfolded under conditions that most sports narratives do not anticipate.
Arizona, 2026
Hendriks is currently assigned to the ACL Cubs—the Arizona Complex League affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. The ACL is the entry-level tier of affiliated minor league baseball. Most of its players are 18 to 22 years old, recent draft selections or international signees who have not yet played a professional game. For a pitcher with Hendriks' career history to be working his way through that circuit at 37 is, by any conventional measure, extraordinary. Whether this assignment leads to a return to the major leagues is not yet known. What is documentable is that the attempt is ongoing, and that the person making it has already disproved, more than once, the assumptions that accumulate around a career of this length.
Australia does produce MLB players—a small but consistent stream, including several other notable major leaguers—but the pathway is structurally different from anything American fans would recognize. There is no high school varsity baseball culture, no college baseball circuit with MLB attention, and no network of showcases and travel teams. Until relatively recently, there were no MLB academies within the country. Players who reach the major leagues from Australia have generally done so through the national team program, international amateur combines, or direct scouting contacts. The support structures that American prospects navigate—often without realizing they are structures at all—do not exist there.
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Liam Hendriks gear at the official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.