Asked to recall conflict early in his amateur career, Bauer reflects.
“My high-school coach…” he begins, before briefly pausing to pick at the Parmesan-crusted pork chop he always orders at Yard House near his in-season accommodations in suburban Cleveland. Then he emphasizes a single word: “Jesus.”
Drive north on I-5 beyond the coastal foothills in Los Angeles, where the highway brushes by the San Gabriel Mountains, and the feel of the Pacific Ocean and the California coast fades away. Eventually, the road leads to the working-class city of Santa Clarita, Bauer’s hometown, an arid, desert environment about thirty-five miles from the LA city center saturated with bungalow houses and cookie-cutter subdivisions and surrounded by shrub-pocked hills.
There in the sun-baked bullpen of the Hart High School baseball complex, Bauer was told after joining the varsity team to reach a point in his pitching delivery where he would be perfectly balanced—and stationary—on his right leg. Bauer thought the exercise was absurd. It was conventional pitching advice, handed down from generation to generation. To Bauer, it was flat-out wrong. He exaggerated the motion, stopping and balancing on his right leg. Turning to the Hart High coach, he quipped, “Is this good? Can I throw now?”
It’s not that he won’t listen, Bauer says, it’s that he rejects bad advice. He explains that he’s very coachable if someone is presenting useful information and can explain its logic. He just doesn’t automatically acquiesce to authority. More often, he questions it. He wants to know the logic or science behind any practice or drill he’s being asked to do. This is part of the Bauer DNA.
“My dad taught me not to be blindly allegiant and to question authority and to think for myself,” Bauer says. “Maybe I take it too far sometimes.”
Warren’s father was a World War II bomber pilot and first-generation American who had emigrated from Germany. He became an early computer programmer for New Mexico’s oil and gas division, and Warren still remembers him working through sheets of code at the kitchen table. Warren was expected to be self-sufficient at eighteen and leave his parents’ modest home in Santa Fe. He bought and operated his own Dunkin’ Donuts, sold it, and used the money to pay for tuition and housing at the Colorado School of Mines, where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. He worked in the oil and gas industry for a few years in the oil fields of central California before returning to New Mexico, where he opened a furniture business with his brother.
Although Warren did not play sports as a kid, his son was obsessed with baseball from a young age. He first pitched at age seven in a Little League game. He was one of the few players who could keep the ball over the plate, so he kept pitching. After the season, Warren asked Trevor if he wanted to continue to pitch. He did. In that case, Warren said, he would pay for lessons so that Trevor could improve and not hurt himself—but his son had to put in the work. He had to be invested in becoming better.
They went to the local batting cages and found a pitching instructor named Silvio, who was from the Dominican Republic. He taught a practice that incorporated the first unconventional training implement adopted by the Bauers: throwing weighted balls. In the Dominican Republic, Silvio explained, pitchers threw weighted balls, or almost any heavy object they could turn into a projectile, to build strength. When they went home, Warren and Trevor filled a Tupperware container with water and soaked several baseballs. At eight years old, Bauer had his first experience with a tool that later became a well-known part of his training regimen.
“After three days the water would be all full of algae and moss and whatever. They’d smell terrible,” Bauer says. “We’d be throwing soaked balls, gripping wet balls, gloves would get wet, splatter us in the face.… Throwing weighted balls then wasn’t popularized. You couldn’t go online and buy them.”
Warren was commuting to New Mexico, flying into Albuquerque on Sunday and returning early Friday morning, so Bauer had to practice on his own and be fully accountable. That taught him to adhere to a strict regimen. “My work ethic started from a young age because I had to do it to get lessons,” he says.
Since Warren didn’t play baseball, he had no preconceived notions of what baseball training should look like. For Warren, his son’s activity was a great science experiment. They began to learn about pitching together, examining and questioning everything from the ground up, like engineers. They read about how Nolan Ryan pounded nails into softballs to add weight. And after two years of working with Silvio, they felt they had absorbed all they could from him and began to question some of his methods. They needed growth.
When Trevor was ten, a family friend and former college pitcher, Jim Wagner, said he was going to begin giving pitching instruction. Bauer became one of his first clients. At first, Wagner related information gleaned from experience, pitching-instruction books, and videos. But the then pint-sized Bauer seemed to be making little, if any, progress. Wagner suggested Trevor meet with a former teammate of his, Alan Jaeger, who had become a pitching instructor and proponent of long toss—essentially, throwing a baseball as far as one possibly can—and pulldowns, which were crow-hop, max-effort, on-a-line throws from flat ground covering shorter distances. Often Jaeger would have a pitcher throw from three-hundred-plus feet and then “compress,” or work back toward his throwing partner with pulldowns from increasingly shorter distances. Jaeger counted big leaguers Barry Zito and Dan Haren among his clients, but he was one of the few coaches advocating long toss, which was extreme and antithetical to conventional thought. Naturally, Bauer was interested.
One purpose of long-toss and max training is to teach intent. Throwing baseballs hundreds of feet forces a pitcher to exert maximum effort, expanding his body’s capabilities and fostering gradual skill growth. From a technical standpoint, long toss is also designed to promote greater flexibility in the throwing motion by increasing external shoulder rotation, or movement away from the center of the body. To experience external rotation, extend your throwing arm straight out from your shoulder to your side, parallel to the ground, and raise your hand, bending your elbow upward to form a 90 degree angle. Then try to move your hand backward as if you were pulling a giant rubber band. Alternatively, imagine pulling a rubber band attached to the center of your chest away from your body. That external rotation of the shoulder joint also causes the elbow to rotate. Increased external rotation is closely linked to velocity gains, as it creates a “greater arc of motion over which force can be applied to the baseball,” according to strength coach Ben Brewster.3 Internal rotation is the opposite movement, motion toward the center of the body.
There are three basic ways to improve velocity: get stronger, adopt more efficient mechanics, or create more mobility. Pitching researchers often advise caution because so little is known about the impact of pushing the arm’s limits. Yet some have quantified the benefits of pushing the body, finding that throwing from greater distances, and with greater intent, increases range of motion and arm speed. In 2017, the Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine published a study of 16 Division I college pitchers that found the pitchers’ external shoulder rotation had improved from 129.4 degrees to 135.9 degrees after just three days of long-toss training.4 A 2015 paper by Dr. Kevin E. Wilk and his colleagues, based on data gathered by following 296 professional pitchers from 2005 to 2012, showed that increasing shoulder mobility is crucial in preserving pitchers’ arms, reporting that pitchers with a deficit in external shoulder rotation were 2.2 times more likely to be placed on the injured list (at that time called the disabled list) and 4 times more likely to undergo shoulder surgery compared to pitchers with sufficient external rotation.5
When Trevor was twelve, Jaeger put him on a routine that perhaps no other kid in the country would have recognized. Before Bauer began a throwing session, he used TheraBand rubber tubing to attach his right wrist to a static object like a fence or railing. He then performed a series of resistance exercises originally designed to rehabilitate torn rotator cuffs. The bands worked his external a
nd internal rotation. After that warm-up, he needed space to launch throws as far as possible. He was mastering intent, and his body was learning, implicitly, to organize itself in the most efficient manner to create velocity. Long toss and pulldowns became a vital part of his routine.
It was through Wagner that Bauer first learned of the Texas Baseball Ranch. Wagner had stumbled upon an obscure, spiral-bound book on pitching mechanics, The Athletic Pitcher by Ron Wolforth. The first thing most pitching coaches taught was mechanics. Not Wolforth. He didn’t believe in cookie-cutter approaches or trying to copy or clone the throwing motions of effective pitchers. He noted that pitchers in the 1930, ’40s, and ’50s had individualized, natural deliveries, and he argued that they threw far more innings, seemingly without suffering more injuries (although injury data for that era is scarce, and pitchers generally threw softer, which subjected their bodies to less stress).6 He studied javelin throwers to glean insights into their motions, and he employed weighted balls and long-toss regimens. Intrigued, Wagner sent his son on a reconnaissance mission. The younger Wagner returned from the ranch with a simple message for the Bauers: “You have to go out there.”
At the time, Wolforth was running weekend camps for $200. Anyone who bought five camp tickets received a sixth for free. Warren bought a six-pack for his fourteen-year-old son. What Trevor remembers about his first trip is the insufferable heat. There were fans, but they were blowing humid, 100 degree air in from outside the training facility. It seemed hotter inside the semicircular structure. The campers broke into three groups, each engaged in a different drill or activity. In one drill, a pitcher tried to throw a four-pound ball with two hands from above his head at 40 mph, which equated, Wolforth calculated, to throwing a ball 90 mph from a mound. If a pitcher can’t break 90 mph, he has little chance to be a successful major-league pitcher. In 2008, the average major-league starting pitcher’s fastball flew 91.3 mph. By 2018, that figure had climbed to a record 93.2. When he arrived at the ranch, Bauer couldn’t touch 80.
When groups of pitchers at the ranch rotated from station to station, Bauer’s father didn’t follow his son. He was transfixed by the facility’s camera system. At home, Warren would train a camcorder on his son and record VHS footage of him throwing. The ranch used a more sophisticated video system, with a higher-frame-rate camera, to analyze mechanics. For three days, Warren listened to instructor Brent Strom—now the Astros’ pitching coach—speak about analyzing pitchers via video. He also watched video of a prep pitcher named Josh Bohack, who went on to pitch at Northeast Texas Community College and could throw in the low 90s. (The ranch had no famous clients.) Warren observed how Bohack’s front knee completely straightened out and his torso flexed forward, creating a 90 degree angle, as he released each pitch, another sequence that correlated with velocity gain. “That image was burned into my dad’s head,” Trevor says. At UCLA, his delivery had similar attributes.
In his freshman season at Hart High, Bauer hit 76 mph. After visiting the Houston facility several times after his freshman year and during and after his sophomore year, he hit 94 mph in a tournament in the December before his junior season began. Coaches from UCLA and Stanford were there to see the radar readings.
“Sixteen months of being down there completely changed me,” Bauer says.
The ranch is where Bauer learned how to acquire velocity. It’s where he and his father were exposed to the power of high-speed video. He learned to exchange endurance training, like running the warning track, for explosive drill work that mimicked the act of throwing. He also learned concepts like pitch tunneling, a theory that the longer different types of pitches could share the same release point and path to home plate, disguising their true nature, the more effective they would be. To help him practice tunneling, Warren constructed a metal frame with a thirteen-by-ten-inch opening to target and placed it twenty feet from a practice mound. That was the distance at which a pro hitter would have to decide to swing. If two pitches both traveled through the opening, they shared a tunnel. It may have been the first tunneling instrument ever designed. This was one of the first innovations Bauer brought to baseball. It would not be the last.
Arguably, the most valuable tool Bauer had acquired was his distinctive shoulder tube or, as it’s sometimes described, wiggle stick or javelin, which he continues to use. Bauer is the only pitcher who walks to and from the Cleveland clubhouse carrying a semirigid six-foot pole with weighted cylinders attached to each end. He won’t throw a baseball until he’s warmed up with the shoulder tube by grasping the center of the pole and shaking it at various points above his head, in front of his body, and to his side.
Bauer believes in warming up to throw, not throwing to warm up, and the tube activates muscles in the shoulder, forearm, and upper chest, increasing blood flow to those regions. He also twirls the staff like a propeller, even holding it behind his back to mix up the routine. He could fit in on the flag corps of a high-school band. Wolforth said that if he lost every piece of equipment at his facility, the first thing he would want to bring back was the tube, which he came to view not only as a warm-up aid but as a secret to the durability of pitchers’ shoulders and arms. But when Bauer incorporated the shoulder tube into his routine with his high-school team as a sophomore, he was ridiculed by players and coaches. They called it Bauer’s “penis pole” and “Linus’s blanket.”
Ridicule never seemed to bother Bauer, and it didn’t stop him from continuing to carry the pole. He was so obsessed with baseball that as an elementary-school student he insisted on wearing his jersey pants to school. Bauer’s mother warned him he’d probably be mocked. He wore them anyway, and her prediction came true. He kept wearing them.
Bauer’s small group of friends featured fellow social misfits. “They were willing to accept his oddities, and so he was willing to accept theirs, and so they got along great,” Warren says. “But the people Trevor didn’t get along with are the people that felt it necessary to try to mold Trevor to their status, or their way of going about things, versus just letting him be whatever he was.”
“His mom isn’t a conformist, and I’m sure not,” Warren continues. “So we didn’t encourage him to conform, but we didn’t discourage him. We just encouraged him to make his own choice.”
Trevor can vividly recall approaching a crowded table in the Hart High cafeteria and seeing its occupants quickly disperse despite his status as a rising athletic star. To avoid embarrassment and loneliness, the school’s best baseball player began to retreat during lunch to the classroom of his AP physics teacher, Martin Kirby. Bauer could talk to Kirby about physics and its applications to baseball, which became crucial to his career. He had little in common with most of his peers, which is still often true today. Bauer doesn’t go out after games. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t play cards in the clubhouse. He generally keeps to himself, and he walks to the field and training areas with purpose. He’s stubborn, impatient, and fixated on training and information gathering. When he sets a goal, he’s determined to reach it.
“I’m an obsessive personality type,” Bauer says. “When I got a new video game, I would just play that nonstop. That’s all I wanted to do. I stopped going to class my sophomore year [at UCLA] because I would play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for eight hours a day. I would play until 4 a.m. and sleep until noon. I would get food, go to the field, do a little bit of homework, come back, and play until 4 a.m. again. I got really good at it, really quickly. Then my grades plummeted, and I was almost ineligible to play in the College World Series. At that point, I said, ‘I’m not playing video games anymore because ultimately that’s affecting my main job.’”
His main job was to be the best pitcher he could be.
At Hart High, he went 12–0 as a pitcher in his junior year. He continued to use the shoulder tube, and he continued to ignore his high-school coaches’ advice. Tensions mounted. “My dad just told me, basically, ‘You have way better information from other places, if [the coach] can’t ha
ndle it, fuck him,’” Bauer says. His relationship with the program grew more and more strained.
In the evenings, after school, Bauer made a bicycle commute from his home to a park in the center of his subdivision neighborhood. An open green space there was large enough for Bauer to conduct the long-toss regimen that he still follows in the outfield before his starts, uncorking throws that routinely sail more than three hundred feet. On one late evening, Bauer continued to throw after the lights at the park’s tennis facility illuminated. A tennis instructor became irritated by the constant sound of the balls rattling against the fence surrounding the courts and complained to Bauer’s baseball coaching staff. The next day, Bauer says, the coaches confronted him.
Bauer was viewed as disobedient and lacking respect, but he felt he wasn’t treated fairly. Unlike other players, he wasn’t out partying. He was a good student who put in more practice hours than anyone else. Yet there was constant friction between Bauer and the staff and even upperclassmen on the team. They didn’t care for Bauer’s brashness or his training techniques. So before his senior season at Hart High, Bauer quit the team. Rather than play out his senior year and improve his draft stock—J.J. Cooper, executive editor of Baseball America, says he was on the radar of professional clubs—Bauer graduated high school early and enrolled for the 2009 spring semester at UCLA, where he had committed to play college ball.
When Bauer and his father visited Bruins coach John Savage to ask him about his stance on Bauer’s unorthodox training, Savage said he would allow it but that Bauer would have to participate in all team-related activities and training. Savage promised to “leave him alone” if he pitched well.
The MVP Machine Page 4
