Trevor Bauer’s Offseason Face Turn.
For the past several years, Trevor Bauer has been the closest thing that Major League Baseball had to a professional wrestling villain. On the field, the twenty eight year old right handed pitcher has distinguished himself as a top talent who was picked third overall in the 2011 draft out of UCLA, pitched in the playoff rotation for the 2016 AL pennant winning Cleveland Indians, and in 2018 was an All Star and finished top 10 in Cy Young Award voting. But it is off the field is where Bauer has achieved infamy as one of the most controversial players in the game today.
A 2019 Sports Illustrated profile of him was titled “ Trevor Bauer Is More Concerned With Being Right Than Being Liked, ” which turned out to be an accurate description. It describes how Bauer is fiery and confrontational on social media, often getting into prolonged Twitter battles with random people who comment on his tweets; one such incident involving a young woman was deemed by some of Bauer’s detractors as harassment, though he denies that it was.
Not all of the controversial statements Bauer has made on and offline are baseball related, but some of them indeed were. In 2018, Bauer claimed on Twitter that the Houston Astros pitchers were using a foreign substance to increase the spin rate on their pitches (which is against MLB rules). To prove his point, Bauer said that he himself used a similar substance on his own pitches for a single inning to demonstrate that it was an effective cheating tactic; the analytical website Fangraphs noted that during the inning Bauer said he used the substance his spin rates did in fact increase dramatically.
Astros pitchers fired back at Bauer on social media, with the beef between Bauer and Houston intensifying months later after the Astros swept Bauer’s Cleveland Indians in the 2018 playoffs. Bauer had been hit hard by Houston coming out of the bullpen, and star Astros third baseman Alex Bregman did not let him forget it, taunting that Bauer was “[Houston’s] MVP in the playoffs.”
Those in the baseball world as a whole seemed to implicitly side with the Astros at the time- after all, they were the new darlings of the entire baseball world, fresh off of delivering a World Series to Houston in 2017 in the wake of the city being devastated by Hurricane Maria. Who was this self-righteous punk Bauer to question their integrity?
Karma seemed to be favoring Houston throughout the 2019 season- after all, Alex Bregman had a dazzling season where he finished second in MVP voting, while Bauer suffered a major dropoff from his All Star 2018- his most notable on the field moment was throwing the ball over the center field fence from the pitcher’s mound in frustration at giving up several runs in one inning to the Kansas City Royals. Days later, Bauer was traded from Cleveland to the Cincinnati Reds, who missed the postseason, while the Astros won the American League pennant and just missed out on a second World Series in three years. Little did baseball fans know that the karmic tables were soon to turn.
Shortly after Houston’s Fall Classic defeat, the sports world learned just how much their integrity deserved to be questioned. The scandal surrounding their illegal sign-stealing has made the Astros name a byword for cheating. Suddenly Bauer was no longer the abrasive finger-pointer, but someone who had been speaking the truth unheeded for years before the Astros’ true nature was unmasked. To use professional wrestling terms, Bauer had previously been a “heel,” or villain, who turned “face,” or hero.
Bauer’s specific accusations of Astros misconduct, that of pitchers using substances, has yet to be proven. But absolutely no one would be surprised if it were to be the case, and indeed many believe that the scope of the Astros’ cheating went beyond what was described in the official report issued by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. And who was among the loudest voices criticizing Manfred’s handling of the Astros investigation? Trevor Bauer, of course, who called the commissioner “a joke” in regards to both his handling of the investigation and also the recent changes he proposed to the MLB playoffs, which have been met with widespread ridicule.
Bauer has now been seen as someone ahead of the curve for calling out Houston all the way back in 2018; his claims of integrity, once mocked, now are validated. Now he has celebrity baseball fans like Jerry Seinfeld singing his praises, while the Astros find themselves on the receiving end of tirades from ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, who rarely turns his attention to baseball. Alex Bregman and the Astros now find themselves cast for the role of the villain, with their initial press conference at the start of Astros spring training widely panned as a poor excuse for an apology.
Of course, there is one part of Bauer’s face turn story that has yet to be written, and that is of redemption on the field. As previously mentioned, Bauer’s 2019 was a major disappointment, one he will be hoping to erase in 2020. With the Reds he is well positioned to do just that, however. This offseason, the club hired Kyle Boddy as director of pitching and pitching coordinator.
Boddy is the founder of Driveline Baseball, a training facility in Kent, Washington known for its use of analytics and advanced technology to improve pitcher performance. Bauer was the first high profile pitcher to start working with Boddy and Driveline, and he has trained there every offseason for several years. If anyone can help Bauer return to his All Star form of 2018, Boddy can.
In one of his recent interviews, Bauer said that one of the biggest problems facing baseball today is the lack of appealing personality among its top players, which he believes is by design due to MLB’s media training teaching players from a young age to shy away from speaking their minds and attracting attention. He compares this unfavorably to the NBA and its abundance of outspoken, star players. Though he did not suggest it, Bauer himself is the antithesis of what he decries in MLB’s stars today- outspoken, intelligent, and generating strong reactions whenever he speaks. With his newfound status as an unlikely baseball hero, Bauer could be something that few could have imagined- the star that the sport needs right now.
