Jasrado “Jazz” Chisholm Jr. was 4 years old when he explained to his grandmother how his life would turn out. He’d become a professional baseball player.
Patricia Coakley didn’t pat him on the head, call it a nice dream and explain that few children from Nassau play second base for the New York Yankees. Instead, she looked at him and said, “I know you will. Because you’re the greatest in the world.”
Four years later, Chisholm was playing Little League and still waiting for his first home run. His grandmother had another prediction: “You’re going to hit a home run today. Because you are the greatest in the world.” At his next at-bat, he knocked the ball over the fence. Chisholm remembers afterward saying to himself, “Oh my God. I am the best in the world.”
Coakley had handed her grandson the kind of confidence that can alter the course of a life, especially when it arrives before doubt has had time to settle in. “If you have someone who believes in you as much as you believe in yourself,” Chisholm says, “You can get anywhere.”
Chisholm has spent the years since proving his grandmother right. He became a Major League Baseball All-Star, the face of a video game, a 30 home run and 30-stolen-base player, and, in 2024, an infielder for the New York Yankees.
She always liked to look good. You look good, you feel good. You look good, you play good.”
Before Chisholm was the second baseman with electric-blue hair, custom cleats, bat flips and a considerable amount of swagger, there was his childhood in The Bahamas. The lessons came from Coakley; from Geron Sands, his stepfather and childhood coach; and from the dirt fields where he learned that baseball could be both serious work and enormous fun. “I feel like The Bahamas is in my energy, in my style,” Chisholm says. “I’m kind of chill and laid back most of the time, but then I’ll have points where I’m still super-high energy.”
The style is not accidental. Coakley, a standout softball player who represented The Bahamas internationally, believed appearance and confidence belonged in the same sentence. “It’s more of the confidence that came from my grandma, especially in the way you carry yourself,” Chisholm says. “She always liked to look good. You look good, you feel good. You look good, you play good.”
Look at old photographs of Coakley and the connection becomes obvious. She wore her hat tilted upward, much as her grandson does now. “Although mine is a bit more extreme,” he says. She pulled her socks high and wore one sweatband. Chisholm adopted those details, then took the rest several steps further. The hair, the cleats and the color all feel natural to him because they come from home.
“I mean, a lot of that does come from The Bahamas,” he says. “The hair, the cleats, everything. That’s something we like: the bright colors, enjoying the game, having fun, enjoying the wins. I always have to have The Bahamas in everything I do. That’s just who I am.”
It was Sands who helped turn all of Chisholm’s early confidence into a major-league swing. He began coaching Chisholm when he was 9 and became a parental figure after taking him into his home at 15. Sands would tell him, “When you get older, you’ll understand why I do this.”
Chisholm left Nassau as a teenager to attend high school in Wichita, Kansas — an abrupt move from an island capital to the middle of the American plains. He signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2015. As Chisholm has climbed the rungs of professional baseball, Sands remains one of the people Chisholm relies on most, still helping him with the game and everything around it. In 2025, he pitched to Chisholm in the Home Run Derby, a moment that closed the distance between those Nassau practices and one of baseball’s biggest stages.
The Diamondbacks traded Chisholm to the Miami Marlins in 2019, and Chisholm reached the majors the next season. Miami was close enough to Nassau that the flight could take about 30 minutes, but close wasn’t home. “Some days it hits home a little differently when you’re not home with your family,” he says.
Chisholm established himself quickly as one of baseball’s most watchable young players. He became an All-Star in 2022, then the first Marlins player to appear on the cover of
MLB The Show. Then came the Yankees, the team he’d stay up watching as a kid.
Now, friends back home send him videos of their children wearing his jersey. “It’s amazing,” he says. “Because I still remember being in my living room watching [Robinson] Canó, [Derek] Jeter and A-Rod and copying their swings.” Seeing Bahamian children do the same with his jersey on, he says, “always hits home in a different way.”
Chisholm’s interests have always stretched past the diamond. He grew up singing in church and now records his own music. It’s a product of coming from a family where dancing and singing were part of ordinary life. “Music just helps me to be me a little bit more,” he says. “I always loved music, making music, dancing with my family, all of that. We’ve always had a lot of singing and dancing in the family.” His friends have an appropriate nickname for him: “Jazz the Entertainer.”
The name fits, though Chisholm is also relentlessly curious. Coakley told him that “No is always the answer to an unasked question.” When he arrived in the United States and complained that he didn’t know anyone, she told him to go introduce himself to people. That idea — to close the distance between people, places and possibilities — now sits at the center of the Jazz Chisholm Foundation. Its work supports young athletes in The Bahamas and the United States, but the most personal effort may be the Little League program that Chisholm finances in Nassau. The program provides uniforms, equipment, coaching and competition for hundreds of children. When Chisholm returns home, he spends time with his family, visits schools and goes back to the fields where his own ambitions first took shape. “It’s amazing because I was one of them,” he says. “I played on that same dirt. I dove on those same fields.”
He wants the children to learn baseball, but he also wants them to find friends, enjoy life and understand that geography doesn’t determine the size of a future. “I want them to understand that, where we came from, you can do whatever you want,” he says. “If you have a dream, you can accomplish that dream.”
Chisholm is also giving Bahamian children something even more concrete: evidence. They can watch a player from Nassau step into the batter’s box at Yankee Stadium. They can see his name across the back of a jersey. They can stand on the same dirt where he once played and understand that the distance from there to the major leagues is not imaginary.
Chisholm knew that at age 4 because his grandmother told him. Now, he returns to those fields and offers the next child the same possibility: Someone from here can make it. Someone believes you will. Sometimes that’s all the next All-Star needs to hear.
I want them to understand that, where we came from, you can do whatever you want.”
