The highly anticipated MLB debut of Trevor Bauer tonight.

stevenash · 06-28-12, 12:51 PM

The fourth overall pick in the draft, righthander Trevor Bauer was overshadowed by rotation mate Gerrit Cole while at UCLA, but after turning pro he became one of the most impressive young arms anywhere in the minors, and he's a hotter ticket in our book than even Cole is today. After blowing past high-A ball last year, he found his level in AA, though he still struck out an ungodly 14 batters per nine innings even at the higher level (hey, it's more sane than the 17-per-nine he racked up in A ball.) Bauer is a smallish pitcher, with a bit of an unconventional motion, but his quirks are not the flaky flamethrower type, they're more of a dazzling bag-of-tricks variety. While he can reach 100mph if he wishes (we promise), he doesn't actually pitch there, prefering to stay down around 94mph with great and varying movement on his selection of sliders and cutters. He's also got a good head for the game and shows an Ichiro-level commitment to stretching and conditioning exercise. It's possible he will break camp with the Diamondbacks, but with the team not hurting for starters just yet, it's possible that his real prime time won't be until midseason or even 2013.

stevenash · 06-28-12, 12:58 PM

+106/-104

thebestthereis · 06-28-12, 01:00 PM

Without question he should be a near pick em on the road vs Atlanta tonight. Makes total senselessness. Good luck!

russiaboss · 06-28-12, 01:03 PM

On Arizona +119
GL

stevenash · 06-28-12, 01:28 PM

Originally posted by thebestthereis

Without question he should be a near pick em on the road vs Atlanta tonight. Makes total senselessness. Good luck!

Just watching the kid tonight, usually first time phenoms don't win.

No coincidences · 06-28-12, 01:31 PM

Thrown into a road start against a red-hot team trying to avoid a sweep....

No pressure kid.

Chi_archie · 06-28-12, 01:37 PM

don't rub it in about Cole...... Pirates just designated former first round 4th overall pick Daniel Moskos... in front of Weiters and Porcello and 10 other good pros

stevenash · 06-28-12, 01:43 PM

Originally posted by No coincidences

Thrown into a road start against a red-hot team trying to avoid a sweep....

No pressure kid.

I remember watching on ESPN Timmy's very first major league start.
They hyped that game to the max.
Ryan Howard hit one to Neptune that still hasn't come down yet.
Timmy never got out of the fifth inning. Cole Hamels took him to school that game.

El Nino · 06-28-12, 02:06 PM

Stoked for his debut, but like you said, the game is a pass. Jair Jurjens was back to form last game, which one will show up? Braves' bats are too hot right now to bet a rookie making his debut. How much of a leash will Gibby give the kid? Nerves/etc. but he has had sick AAA #'s.

19th Hole · 06-28-12, 02:21 PM

Can't wait ti see how this plays out...
Jurrjens came back up with a solid
outing .

Redscot · 06-28-12, 05:13 PM

This story appears in the June 13, 2011 issue of ESPN The Magazine.

A word of advice: See this kid now. See him while he's still double-hopping across the front of the mound to throw the first warmup pitch of every inning as hard as he can. See him while he's still free to play catch at 380 feet -- nearly foul pole to foul pole -- while singing along to the music in his headphones. See him while he's still playing Hacky Sack with the baseball as part of his pregame routine and wearing a bleached-out, three-year-old, salt-and-sweat-stained cap and not the pristine alternate version his big league team mandates for road Fridays. See him before the codes and constraints of professional baseball squeeze every last one of his idiosyncrasies into conformity. You've never seen anything like UCLA junior righthander Trevor Bauer. He throws a seemingly endless variety of pitches. He subscribes to several theories of pitching and training that challenge baseball's established ideas of how to develop and maintain a hurler. He is statistically the best college pitcher in the country, a surefire top-10 pick in the amateur draft, a ridiculously talented 20-year-old with a 95 mph fastball whose main fault -- yes, fault -- seems to be that he has an arsenal of pitches that nobody in amateur baseball can hit. So why can't many of baseball's decision-makers, those stoic guardians of the status quo, shake the queasy feeling they get from Bauer? Why would a major league front office exec, watching Bauer strike out 15 Oregon State hitters one week after striking out 17 at Stanford, say, "With the stuff he has, I've got to wonder why he has to throw so many pitches to put away college hitters." True, Bauer averages roughly 130 pitches per start, but is it his fault that he has swing-and-miss stuff and rarely gets the benefit of outs on the first or second pitch of an at-bat?

By the statistical measures that portend professional success, Bauer is the best pitcher on the board for the June 6 first-year player draft. He leads the country in strikeouts with 203 in 136 2/3 innings and had a 1.25 ERA in the Pac-10, one of college baseball's toughest conferences. His name has been on a steady rise up draft boards, from potential first-rounder at the beginning of the year to potential top five in June. Yet this kid, the most dominant college pitcher since Stephen Strasburg, whose style and stuff evoke legitimate comparisons to Tim Lincecum -- isn't even in the mix to be the top pick. Why not? It seems baseball still doesn't know how to handle guys who march to their own drum.

Here's a story: During one of Bauer's three years at Hart High in Valencia, Calif., before he left for UCLA halfway through his senior year because he was too mature to deal with another semester of high school silliness, he had an off-season routine of taking a bucket of baseballs to a local park to throw long toss as part of his arm-strengthening regimen. He walked to the park alone because he couldn't find anyone to throw with him. "I didn't have any friends," he says with the emotion of someone reading a grocery list. He threw baseballs from one side of the park to the other, each ball smacking a wooden fence surrounding a tennis court. He did this for close to a year, until a tennis coach decided to hold lessons on that court while Bauer did his throwing.

This was a problem. The tennis coach told him to stop. He refused. The tennis coach sent a letter to his baseball coach, who suggested Bauer stop. He refused. He told his coach, "Sorry if I wasn't taught to be blindingly allegiant to authority."

But that wasn't Bauer's main gripe with the tennis coach. The letter to the baseball coach included the phrase, "The unexpected repetitiveness of the ball hitting the fence." This upset Bauer's sense of order. His eyes widen, his voice rises. "How could something be repetitive and unexpected at the same time?" he asks. "If it's repetitive, don't you come to expect it?"

Enter the world of Trevor Bauer, where nothing is taken at face value.

He is a devotee of the teachings of Perry Husband, a former hitting coach who devised a theory of pitch sequencing called Effective Velocity. EV is complicated -- Husband calls it "the theory of relativity but with baseball" -- but it relies on a pitcher's ability to make each pitch look the same for the first 20 feet, at which point a hitter has to decide to swing. The deception relies on a pitcher's throwing each pitch through the same "tunnel." Bauer was not content to merely understand the concept of tunnels; he wanted to put it into practice. According to Husband's research, a normal strike zone, when extrapolated to 20 feet from a pitcher's release point, measures 13 inches by 10 inches. So Trevor and his father, Warren, an engineer, built a metal contraption with a 13 by 10 opening. It is placed 20 feet from the mound, and Bauer throws bullpen sessions through it. In theory, each pitch that travels through the Bauers' homemade tunnel will not only be a strike but will also look the same beyond the point where the hitter must decide to swing. "I call them the Bauer Engineering Crew," says Ron Wolforth, the director of the Texas Baseball Ranch, the training academy where Trevor has spent many summers. "The stuff they do isn't in any manual. It's Effective Velocity 501."

It's not enough for Bauer to execute a pitch. He has to understand it, dissect it, improve upon it. He has to turn it sideways tilt his head and examine it from all angles. Performance is simply a by-product of process. UCLA coach John Savage calls him the Mad Scientist of Pitching. Wolforth, who clocked Bauer at 102.7 mph last summer, says, "Trevor always has a million questions. Some of them are ethereal, but they're all insightful." Alan Jaeger, whose long-toss program is part of Bauer's training, says, "He pitches with the wisdom of Greg Maddux at 33."

Bauer entered UCLA at 17 as an engineering student but has changed majors to computer science, and he leaves nothing to chance. For instance: Believing he needed a pitch that would run away from lefthanded hitters, Trevor invented a "reverse slider," which differs from a screwball in that it's thrown 87 to 88 mph, about 10 mph faster than a screwball.

For many baseball executives, evaluating Bauer is a blind leap into the unknown. Subscribing to his regimen is almost like a dare. One scout watched Bauer run over the mound to fire his first between-inning warmup pitch and said, "He's got great stuff, but I'm not Freud."

Bauer's atypical approach will likely scare off certain high-picking clubs -- such as the Pirates and Royals -- that prefer pitchers who fit the traditional archetype. Of course, it's that kind of logic that caused Lincecum to fall to the Giants at No. 10 in the 2006 draft. Bauer's response to the critics is typically direct: "Just let me do my thing, and I'll be good for a long time. When I meet with some baseball people, I see their eyes glaze over when I try to explain what I'm doing. It's like I'm a heretic going against the Church of Baseball."

And yet, the results are impossible to ignore, even for some of the highest-ranking members of the game's clergy. Start by start, inning by inning, batter by batter and pitch by pitch, Bauer has given them reasons to believe.

Sometimes, even heretics win converts.

Jutzu · 06-28-12, 05:18 PM

Fade!

Brock Landers · 06-28-12, 05:21 PM

on the Braves tonight!!

lunchbawks · 06-28-12, 05:23 PM

bauer is the real deal. jair is a POS bak to minors in no time

we're getting +money

take it

Nyjrkm06 · 06-28-12, 05:28 PM

nashy any leans? tn

ChalkyDog · 06-28-12, 05:53 PM

Bauer is a very good pitcher, will be the Ace of the Dbacks staff by years end.

Saw him play against the Tucson Padres a few weeks ago, kid is filthy.

a4u2fear · 06-28-12, 05:59 PM

taking the hotlanta

JMon · 06-28-12, 05:59 PM

Originally posted by No coincidences

Thrown into a road start against a red-hot team trying to avoid a sweep....

No pressure kid.

Braves are 4-7 L11 going for a 3gm home sweep, Diamondbacks are 4-0 in L4 in avoiding a road 3gm sweep, 3-0 this year. Meaningless.

stevenash · 06-28-12, 06:28 PM

15 pitch impressive first inning.

lunchbawks · 06-28-12, 06:36 PM

son of a whore kubel thinks he's usain bolt.. motherfkker

romecloneout · 06-28-12, 06:36 PM

picked him up on my fantasy team....should be a stud

Hangoverblack · 06-28-12, 06:40 PM

Originally posted by lunchbawks

son of a whore kubel thinks he's usain bolt.. motherfkker

My thought exactly. Faded Jair big 1st five innings. That really hurt

stevenash · 06-28-12, 06:46 PM

Fancy piece of pitching to get out of the second cleanly.
I like this kid.

russiaboss · 06-28-12, 09:16 PM

lunchbawks · 06-28-12, 09:59 PM

bauer review: weird ass pitching style, lots of variety, walks a problem..

pretty good outing, dbacks haven't beaten ATL since 2002

JMon · 06-28-12, 11:09 PM

Originally posted by JMon

Braves are 4-7 L11 going for a 3gm home sweep, Diamondbacks are 4-0 in L4 in avoiding a road 3gm sweep, 3-0 this year. Meaningless.

meaningless.

Year	Team	Lg	Level	Unif	Org	Age	Rk	W	L	ERA	G	GS	CG	SH	GF	SV	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	WP	Bk	WHIP	H9	HR9	BB9	SO9	BB/SO	GB/FB	QS	HB	AB	Bavg	TBF	Pit/B	Bal	Str	Sw	Record	TR
2009	UCLA	Pac10	NCAA	11	-	18	4	9	3	2.99	20	10	4	1	0	2	105.1	85	39	35	7	27	92	10	4	1.06	7.26	0.60	2.31	7.86	0.29	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	27-29	4
2010	UCLA	Pac10	NCAA	47	-	19	3	12	3	3.02	18	18	1	0	0	0	131.1	121	64	44	10	41	165	12	3	1.23	8.29	0.69	2.81	11.31	0.25	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	50-15	2
2011	UCLA	Pac10	NCAA	47	-	20	1	13	2	1.25	16	16	10	3	0	0	136.2	73	22	19	6	36	203	8	1	0.80	4.81	0.40	2.37	13.37	0.18	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	33-22	1
	Visalia	Calif	A+	-	ari	20	-	0	1	3.00	3	3	0	0	0	0	9.0	7	3	3	1	4	17	1	0	1.22	7.00	1.00	4.00	17.00	0.24	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	63-77	5
	Mobile	Sou	AA	13	ari	20	-	1	1	7.56	4	4	0	0	0	0	16.2	20	14	14	2	8	26	5	0	1.68	10.80	1.08	4.32	14.04	0.31	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	84-54	1
2012	mobile	sou	AA		ari	21	6/27/2012	7	1	1.68	8	8	0	0	0	0	48.1	33	12	9	1	26	60			1.22	6.14	0.19	4.84	11.17	0.43	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--
	reno	pcl	AAA		ari	21	6/27/2012	4	0	2.82	8	8	0	0	0	0	44.2	42	14	14	4	22	56			1.43	8.46	0.81	4.43	11.28	0.39	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--