Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer touches his eye during a spring training game against the San Diego Padres in Glendale, Arizona, on March 6, 2021.Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
On the weekend, Trevor Bauer pitched an inning of professional baseball with one eye closed.
Why?
Ostensibly, because that’s part of his training routine.
“I figured if they can’t score off me with one eye open, it’s going to be difficult to score off me with two eyes open,” Bauer told reporters later.
Okay, sure. By that logic, he should try kicking the ball at the batter.
Everyone played along with this circus act. The other team, the San Diego Padres, were visibly amused. How else would you play it? Get angry? That would make you look more ridiculous than you already do, which is a not inconsiderable amount.
Bauer’s new manager in Los Angeles, Dave Roberts, was apparently delighted, praising the “method to his madness.” I guess that means Roberts will be equally delighted if his catcher faces away from the mound and his centre fielder bats with a golf club. What? He won’t? But I thought he liked madness?
We all know the real reason Bauer did it – because he is temperamentally a bit of a jerk, because it will upset people and because he can get away with it. Bauer shouldn’t have his last name across his back. It should instead read, “Dare Me To.”
Bauer may be the best pitcher in baseball. He is certainly the easiest to dislike. The combination makes him the most (only?) interesting man in the major leagues.
What’s he done? Where should we start? There’s his social-media presence. Let’s call that combustible.
You’d assume most of these guys are too rich and famous to care what the lumpenproletariat thinks of them. Not Bauer. He’s got nothing but time to practise his one-eye-closed Twitter game on the plebs. You come at him and he will come back at you. He’ll make it a mission. He has gone right up to the point you can’t go to any more, then gone well beyond it and lived to tell the tale. He is proof that if you have enough talent, you can do or say just about anything you want.
There was the manner in which he handled his free agency this past winter. Most pros in his position would have slow-rolled that. Bauer acted as though he was in the midst of launching a human IPO, which he sort of was.
When he decided on the Dodgers, he didn’t just reveal the decision in a video with the production value of a Michael Bay film. Oh, no. That might smack of humility. He spiked the football on all the teams that hadn’t got him, including the Blue Jays, by teasing himself in their jerseys. He apparently wrote the script, which includes such ready-for-BrainyQuote lines as, “For me, it’s 25 seasons of baseball sewn into every thread [on the baseball].”
Sorry, what is sewn into the thread? Wouldn’t that be other threads? That doesn’t make any … well, whatever. It’s your video, man.
Bauer’s been putting on this show for years, but never in the right venue. He started off in Cleveland, which is not exactly the centre of the media universe. Then he was traded to Cincinnati, which is a 10-hour drive from the closest city.
But now Bauer’s in L.A., on what was already the best team in baseball before he got there. On paper, the Dodgers are so good that MLB shouldn’t bother with a season. Just start with the trophy presentation and then do everything else for funsies.
That means there are only two options for Season 1 of Trevor Bauer Goes to L.A. He will either turn that team into the Babe Ruth Yankees, or (please let it be this one) it will be a disaster for which he gets 100 per cent of the blame.
It’s not that difficult to find a left-hander who throws hard or a great fielder who hits for power. Although rare, those people can be created. All that’s required is a robust enough market for that skill.
What is actually hard to find in sports, and baseball in particular, is someone willing to be a public menace 162 games a year. Someone who will go out and mock your main National League rival, knowing he will be torn apart on talk radio and does not care.
Sports can’t be all heroes. It needs villains. And where are they? Nowhere. There is a critical villain shortage.
There are guys nobody likes. James Harden. Nobody likes him any more. He quit on his old team and forgot the address to his home gym. That’s all it takes these days. Phil Kessel got a rough ride in Toronto and was run out on a rail. He spent a few years in Pittsburgh sun-tanning in Sidney Crosby’s glow and somehow became lovable.
Harden and Kessel were intermittently unlikable, but they weren’t classic villains. Both want to be loved, but couldn’t figure out how to do it properly.
Bauer is an honest-to-God agent of chaos. Clearly, he draws strength from upsetting people. Any people. All people. He’s an equal-opportunity upsetter.
In baseball, this is a superpower everyone has but no one chooses to exercise. What do you think of the best player in the game, Mike Trout? Nothing. He is a cipher. He is so disinclined to be interesting, you can’t even picture the man in your mind’s eye.
Baseball is full of these bland figures, which may be why so many people think baseball has gotten boring. It’s not the length of the games (well, not just that). It’s that every one of them seems too much like every other one. Before October, the only headlines are box scores and cheating scandals. Even the cheaters are determined to remain good guys.
So hip-hip-hurrah for Trevor Bauer and embracing the dark side. I wouldn’t want to be trapped in an elevator with the guy, but I’m very happy to watch him.
I’m not sure what makes him the way he is. For baseball’s sake, I just wish it were contagious.
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