BayStars' Trevor Bauer dejected and searching for answers as slump continues

Japan Times

11 hours ago

Trevor Bauer has lost his way.
Shortly after allowing five runs in a loss to the Yomiuri Giants on Saturday, Bauer leaned against a wall at Tokyo Dome with an unfocused gaze and slumped shoulders. When he tried to make sense of what happened on the field earlier, he could not always find the words, speaking quietly and deliberately, his usual self-assurance masked by the dejection that rolled off him in waves.
Bauer is mired in a slump with three rough outings in his last four games for the Yokohama DeNA BayStars. He has lost four straight decisions and allowed 19 runs in his last 20⅓ innings.
The thing that hits him hardest, though, is that he can't figure out why.
'It's a mixture of frustration and depression,' Bauer said. 'Everything I've tried has been unsuccessful. So I don't know. I have five elite pitches. When I throw them in the zone, they hit like .400 on balls in play. I lead the Central League in strikeouts, but I've given up the most hits and the most runs. I don't know how to rationalize those two things.
'I have elite swing-and-miss stuff, but every time I throw it in the zone, it gets hit. I try to throw more on the edges, I don't get swings out of the zone, and I walk a lot of people. So then, as the game goes along, I try to throw more pitches in the zone, so I don't walk people, and then everything is a hit.'
'I don't know what else to ... I'm completely lost, to be honest.'
Bauer (4-7) allowed seven hits in 5⅓ innings against the Giants. He struck out five and walked six.
'There's a couple of them that I definitely just lost command of the zone,' he said of the walks, four of which came in the first two innings. 'A lot of them, I was trying to be on the edges of the zone. When I get too much of the plate, I give up a lot of hits, so I was trying to be on the edges. They did a good job of laying off some close pitches.
'I thought my command actually got better as the game went along. Incidentally, I ended up giving up a lot more hits and a lot more runs as the game went along too.'
Bauer gave up a two-run double to Yoshihiro Maru that opened the scoring in the fourth and a one-out three-run triple by Louis Okoye in the sixth.
'When he hit it, I thought, 'Oh, it's a routine double play ball,'' Bauer said of Okoye's hit up the middle. 'I thought I was out of the inning. Somehow it was a triple."
Bauer's ERA rose to 4.13 and is the highest among qualified pitchers in NPB. His outing on Saturday came on the heels of a disastrous start against the Chiba Lotte Marines in which he allowed seven runs in one inning on June 22.
BayStars pitching coach Shinji Ohara said after the game that he is not sure when Bauer will make his next start. On Sunday, the BayStars removed the right-hander from the active roster. He will be eligible to return in 10 days.
Bauer said he felt good physically and that his mechanics felt normal. He said he had good communication with catcher Hikaru Ito, who he had not worked with this season, after his bullpen earlier in the week.
When he left the game after Okoye's triple, television cameras caught him having a brief, but animated exchange with Ohara. Bauer declined to go into specifics, saying it was 'personal.'
Bauer's second season in Japan is not going as well as the first when he was 10-4 with a 2.76 ERA for the BayStars in 2023. He pitched in the Mexican League in 2024.
He has been hoping for a return to MLB but has remained on the outside since facing four allegations of sexual assault from 2021 to 2024. Bauer was never arrested or charged.
Bauer, whose last appearance in the majors was in 2021, was suspended by MLB, ultimately serving a 194-game suspension (reduced from 324 games by an independent arbitrator) before being reinstated in December 2022.
As a baseball player, Bauer says he is depressed, something he has not felt before.
'As far as baseball goes, no,' he said. 'I've always felt like I could compete my way out of it. I always felt like there was something I was building towards. I don't really know what that is anymore. Yeah, no, I haven't felt like this before.'