The Dodgers signed Trevor Bauer on Friday, ending hours of speculation about exactly how soon Bob Nightengale would be proven wrong:
(The answer: less than one day)
This signing gives the Dodgers a formidable rotation, with three Cy Young winners (Bauer, Clayton Kershaw, David Price), two former phenoms (Walker Buehler, Julio Urias), one filthy ginger who came out of nowhere to absolutely dominate the National League (Dustin May), and one Tony Gonsolin, who also came out of nowhere to dominate the National League (Tony Gonsolin).
You might have noticed that I listed seven guys there. That’s because the Dodgers, in addition to having more frontline talent than other teams, also have more depth than other teams. They’ll probably win like 110 games this year. It’s awful. Horrible. A nightmare.
Except in one sense: We all get to hate the everlasting shit out of Trevor Bauer.
Bauer, the newest Dodger, was the first round pick of the Diamondbacks — the 3rd overall pick in the draft — back in 2011. He had had an excellent college career at UCLA and, as a Bruin, had modeled his game on Tim Lincecum. That continued into the pros, with Bauer having an excellent minor league season in 2012, but whispers started that he was difficult to coach and a bit of a head case. The Diamondbacks traded him to Cleveland that offseason.
Marc Normandin deleted this tweet in a big tweet purge (I only have it because it was in an old Twitter archive I had sent to me in 2017), but it has stood the test of time as well as Don Quixote:
Bauer improved every year he was in Cleveland, going from an average-ish pitcher in 2014 to a good one in 2016 to one of the best in the league in 2018. Cleveland traded him to the Reds at the deadline in 2019, and he wasn’t much good over the last couple months that year, but he had a fantastic 2020 and won the Cy Young last year, before (eventually) choosing to sign with the Dodgers.
But we’re not here for dry facts about a baseball player’s baseball career. We’re here for why it’s gonna be fun to root against him. Well, I am happy to help with that.
You never want to break out the biggest guns you have to open an article. Where do you go from there? It’ll all be a letdown after that.
On the other hand, here is this rap song from 2012, featuring one Trevor Bauer:
(This video should start at 43 seconds in, when Bauer is horrifically embarrassing himself in rap form by whining about all the girls who didn’t like him way back when but do like him now that he’s got money. It’s atrocious. Check it out! It’s a real good time)
In 2013, Bauer would write a rap song called You Don’t Know Me, seemingly about Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero, who had criticized him to the press. It included the line “You hide behind a mask to facilitate a task, but you don't know me (huh). You won't know me.”
When speaking to the press about it himself, Bauer denied that it was about Montero, like a coward.
Fast forwarding a bit, in 2016 the Cleveland Indians were in the playoffs, and Bauer was one of their starters, and specifically one of the few healthy starters on the playoff roster. What did he do? He injured his finger playing with his drone, like a total fucking dipshit (warning:gross pictures inside). It was a stupid injury at a terrible time, from someone who absolutely knew better but thought that nothing bad would happen to him.
Then he only threw 10 pitches in his next start and lost his next two starts, both in the World Series, in a series that Cleveland eventually lost 4 games to 3. Whoopsie!
Later that year, after losing a World Series that his team would have won if he’d had a good start in it, he tweeted out that he was in favor of Trump’s wall, which is sure to go over great in Los Angeles!
Around 2018, Bauer started making noises that he would only sign 1-year contracts for the rest of his career for some dumbass reason that I don’t remember, but like everything he says and does, it boils down to “I think I’m smarter than everyone else.” Anyway, he did not sign a one-year deal this offseason. Technically, I guess it could be if he opts out after 2021, but the guy’s gonna make $45 million in 2022, so what are the odds of that?
Also, Trevor Bauer is the kind of guy who writes something inscrutable on the mound, prompting this headline:
And he’s also the kind of guy who tweets this wholly unironically:
And then we come to the real big issue a lot of people have with Bauer: the harassment.
Back at the beginning of 2019, Bauer had been criticizing the Astros, getting into it on Twitter with Alex Bregman. Astros fans were unhappy with him, and a college student tweeted that Bauer was her least favorite person in all of sports.
He responded to her (she has since deleted her tweets):
Then, since that wasn’t enough, he went through some old tweets to really pwn the fuck out of that newb:
Then he kept going:
He kept going for 12 hours. 12 hours.
If you are a famous professional athlete, you have to be able to shut the fuck up when someone says “I don’t like you.” It is the most basic social skill a successful person can have, and he doesn’t have it. When you have lots of followers, you have to be able to understand that what you say to someone who isn’t famous will do far, far more damage than that person could ever dream of doing to you. He either doesn’t realize that, or, worse, does realize that.
You can find more tweets in this Old Deadspin piece, if you want. It’s, uh, not fun.
Oh, and speaking of the Astros, last year he said that some statistical evidence (jumps in spin rate) proved their pitchers were definitely doctoring the ball and that there was no other explanation. Then he won the Cy Young, with his great year mostly explained by jumps in his spin rate. Funny story!
To Trevor Bauer, it is, of course, okay when he does this, because Trevor Bauer fucking sucks. And to Trevor Bauer The Dodger, I will say this: Boo. It will feel better than booing any Dodger since Yasiel Puig. Boo, Trevor. It will be cathartic like it couldn’t be when the roster was full of good people (Kershaw), good people whose nicknames are very close to having unfortunate spellings (Kiké Hernandez), and garden variety baseball dudes who Madison Bumgarner glared at and yeah, I can boo you, but we all know Madison Bumgarner would glare at a puppy if he was in a bad mood (Max Muncy).
By contrast, Trevor Bauer is a straight-up chode, a holier-than-thou villain, a garden variety troll who happens to have a million dollar arm, probably a Dogecoin investor, a terminally online doofus, Christopher Hitchens’s arrogance with Aubrey Huff’s brain, and someone absolutely unable to comprehend that the world does not exist for him. He will be a delight to boo and curse, an absolute pleasure to watch every one of his failures.
Maybe he won’t have that many failures. Maybe he will. But either way, we’ll all be there for each one, watching, savoring, feeling good about seeing this out-and-out asshole Dodger get what’s coming to him.