Trevor Bauer: Stay away please
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With free agency looming for Major League Baseball (MLB), the season of major “what-ifs” has officially started. One player who is set to be a free agent this winter is right-handed pitcher Trevor Bauer.
The 31-year-old spent the last year pitching in Japan for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, where he posted solid stats for the club. Previously, he pitched for multiple teams in the MLB, including the Cleveland Guardians and the Cincinnati Reds. He even won the National League Cy Young Award in 2020, which is given to the best pitcher in each league every year.
In 2021, Bauer signed a three-year contract worth $102 million with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Just this past year, however, the Dodgers designated Bauer for assignment – effectively cutting him, according to AP News.
So how did Bauer go from a world-class pitcher to being lucky to get a starting position at the MLB level in under three years? Well, over the past few years, four different women, per ESPN, have accused Bauer of sexual assault. These accusations led to a subsequent administrative leave and suspension from the MLB as they were looked into, which led in turn to his designation for assignment.
Even before these allegations, Bauer had been known to cause a lot of unnecessary drama, getting into feuds with other star players like Alex Bregman and Fernando Tatis Jr. He also lets some of his obsessions come before the game, like the time he cut his finger open on a drone and had to be removed from the playoff game he was pitching in due to severe bleeding.
In normal circumstances, that would be the end of it, but Bauer’s penchant for drama naturally meant he needed to add more to this story. On Oct. 2, Bauer uploaded a video to his social media accounts in which he detailed the outcome of one of his cases, where he and the alleged victim had agreed to drop their cases against one another. He used this video to paint the alleged victim, Lindsey Hill, in a bad light to more than 500,000 followers on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Whether you believe Bauer is telling the truth in that video or not, there should be no circumstance in which Bauer pitches in MLB. I believe there is a detail that was conveniently left out of Bauer’s video.
In Nov. 2021, Hill had a restraining order request against Bauer denied. Many people who defend Bauer believe that this was due to no wrongdoing taking place. However, according to the LA Times, the restraining order request was denied because the judge believed that the two would likely never be in contact again, noting that the denial of a restraining order did not mean that Bauer was innocent of any allegations.
It is also important to note that a case being settled out of court does not mean anyone is completely innocent – it only means that the two sides did not want to take their lawsuit to trial. According to reports from the Washington Post, Hill partly did not feel the need to go to trial because of the $300,000 payment she received from her insurance company for the suit.
Even if one of the four allegations was settled, in what world does that make the other three disappear? The mental gymnastics required to believe Bauer is completely free of wrongdoing is mind-boggling.
For the past year, concerns about Bauer’s behavior have been shared between all 30 MLB teams. When a player gets designated for assignment, all 29 other teams have the chance to sign the player for the league minimum salary of $720,000, according to Statista, while the original team – in this case, the Dodgers – must still pay whatever remaining salary was owed to the player. For Bauer, the Dodgers still owed him $22.5 million.
And yet no team signed him. In other leagues, when players have serious allegations come out against them, they still recieve heavy interest from other teams. In 2022, Deshaun Watson got the highest total guaranteed money in NFL history and the Cleveland Browns gave up three first-round draft picks for him, despite being accused of sexual misconduct and harassment by 26 women, according to Forbes.
Bauer, on the other hand, is clearly not seen as a good enough arm to be worth the risk to sign him. They successfully got him out of the league; now it’s time to keep him out.
However, there have been reports that he is searching for a return to the Majors. Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported on X that Bauer’s representatives have already been reaching out to teams for a possible career revival.
I believe any team that takes a shot at him will sorely regret it. Even if you can somehow look past his open sexual assault cases, off the field he is a nuisance. All he does is make unnecessary noise, and I find it hard to believe that any team would willingly take him.
