LOS ANGELES — A Feb. 2019 profile of Trevor Bauer in Sports Illustrated included this self-assessment by the right-hander who has made iconoclasm his brand.
“I’m good at two things in this world,” Bauer is quoted as telling a former teammate. “Throwing baseballs and pissing people off.”
The Dodgers have signed Bauer – for $102 million over three years – to exhibit the first talent. It remains to be seen how much of the second they will have to stomach along the way.
Bauer’s acknowledged ability to rub people the wrong way has too often been more toxic than playful trolling, delving into online bullying and support of questionable beliefs. Bauer brings that baggage with him to L.A. along with his 2020 NL Cy Young Award.
“Everyone makes mistakes in the past. I try to learn from them,” Bauer said when confronted with his online history during Thursday’s ‘virtual’ press conference announcing his signing with the Dodgers. “I try to learn as quickly as I possibly can, try to understand other people’s viewpoints on things and be better in the future. I think if you look at my history as a baseball player, my history on social media, my history as a person for those who know me well, they’ll see that I apply that process to everything that I do. I’m committed to doing that moving forward as well.
“Ultimately, I’m here to be a positive impact on anyone that I can be – both in the community, in the clubhouse, on the field, at the stadium, whatever the case is.”
His impact has not always been positive in the past.
In January 2019, Bauer got into a back-and-forth on Twitter with a female college student. The trash talk spiraled when Bauer found and retweeted posts from the woman’s account that showed her drinking alcohol before she had turned 21. According to the woman, Bauer’s followers on social media (he currently has more than 422,000 on Twitter and 308,000 on Instagram) pelted her with abuse.
Bauer vowed to “be better on social media” when that incident came to light. But a female New York Daily News reporter said she was subjected to abuse (including death threats) after Bauer tweeted she was “terrible at your job” when she criticized Bauer’s comments about COVID-19 on social media last August. Bauer went through a variety of testing after an inconclusive coronavirus test and posted video of the protocols MLB players were subject to last season.
Those are only the two most aggressive examples of Bauer’s confrontational stance on social media. When pressed on the topic at Thursday’s press conference, Bauer declined to elaborate on what “mistakes” he thought he had made, offering instead a response that seemed well-prepared if not rehearsed.
“I’m not going to go into specifics on everything, all the conversations that I’ve had with people across all walks of life over the past couple of years and all the things that I’ve learned,” he said. “I spent a lot of my time going and talking to people to try to understand other perspectives, and I’m doing my best to be better as I do in all walks of my life. I don’t think that it makes any sense to dive into specific issues in this forum but I am committed to being better on social media, being better on the field, being better in the clubhouse, being better in life in general.
“I’ve made mistakes in the past as I’ve said. I’ve also referenced talking to a lot of different people and trying to understand different perspectives on it. I continue to do that. I don’t think that this is the forum to go into specifics on how that will happen. I think it’s a very nuanced issue. … All I can say is that I’m committed to being a positive member of the community impacting people’s lives in a positive way and winning with this organization.”
A day later, Bauer took swipes on his Twitter account at the local media for spending too much time during the press conference focusing on his past online behavior, denigrating The Athletic, in particular, as “a gossip blog.”
Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman acknowledged that the team had questioned Bauer about his past behavior. But Friedman also did not speak in specifics and quickly pivoted to the positive endorsements former teammates of Bauer provided and the “trust and credibility that has been built up in terms of the research that we do on players and the vetting process” during Friedman’s tenure in Los Angeles.
“We get as much information as we can on players. There’s some stuff that’s more public with Trevor that definitely was something that we wanted to dig into,” Friedman said. “We had multiple conversations with Trevor. Stan (Kasten, Dodgers team president) and I talked to Trevor. And the most important thing is every teammate we talked to, all the feedback we got from every organization he was with was not only incredibly positive in terms of the type of teammate he is, but also in terms of the impact that he makes on each organization.
“From our standpoint, it was important to have that conversation and we came away from it, feeling good about it. Now obviously, time will tell. But I feel like he is going to be a tremendous add, not just on the field but in the clubhouse, in the community.”Whatever trouble Bauer’s online persona might cause, it will fall on Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to make sure it doesn’t become a divisive issue, disrupting the chemistry of a team that has put some priority on that over the past few years. Like Friedman, Roberts pointed to the endorsement of former teammates (notably Alex Wood, who spent 2019 with Bauer in Cincinnati and followed his example to Driveline Baseball in the offseason).
“We found that he’s obviously very talented. He is very competitive. He is a perfectionist and he is liked by his teammates, respected by his teammates,” Roberts said of the results from the background work the Dodgers did before signing Bauer. “You can look back at his outspokenness and I’m sure there are things that he would like to walk back.
“His passion, his intelligence – I know that’s not going to affect how he goes about things in the clubhouse and I don’t think it will affect the clubhouse in any way.”
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