According to an article by Mark Feinsand from MLB earlier in the month, Trevor Bauer is aiming for the highest average annual value in history matching or topping Gerrit Cole’s $36 million per year mega deal he signed with the Yankees. Bauer is coming off of a CY Young season where he went 5 and 4 with an ERA of 1.73 through 73 innings with 100 strikeouts in his final year under contract with the Reds after being traded by the Indians in 2019. Bauer is clearly the top free agent pitcher available this winter and is set to get a decent pay day from a contending team. So far, the clubs most linked to the soon to be 30 year old arm are the Angels and Blue Jays.
As the headline suggests this piece is going to build around the fact that it would be ridiculous for a team to offer Bauer a contract that would give him the highest annual average of pay. It would be crazy if we saw Bauer, who has a career ERA of a 3.90, earning $37+ million a year. For disclosure purposes, I am not saying Bauer cannot pitch to the level to which that salary is at, and if he continues to repeat the previous stretch of years and continue to perform at that level he is well worth a ridiculous amount of money, but rather that his track record of his on field and off field performance does not warrant his seekings.
Pitchers Should Not Be Paid like Hitters
First things first, I do not believe that pitchers should be making position players’ money. The fact that out of the 14 players active in the league $30+ million, 9 are starting pitchers is a bit baffling to me. Maybe, you making the argument that frontline starters are more rare to come by due to the volatility of a pitcher's career with varying issues of performance and injuries, finding a consistent ace who is going to get you those high quality inning year-in, year-out is hard to come by. However, pitchers will top out at maybe 30 games a year (18.5 percent of the season), which is barring no injuries or setbacks. We have seen a rise in the rates of injuries of pitchers seeing even this past season some of the biggest names go under the knife for surgery such as Chris Sale, Luis Severino, Justin Verlander and Noah Syndergaard and every year that list seems to grow and grow. Looking at terms of production you would think that pitcher would generate the most wins above replacement value due to their more controlled impact on an individual game they are playing in however since 2010 aside from a few years of exception hitters have dominated being the majority within the top 5 WAR producers. Back in 2019 (the last full season), out of the top 5, the top 4 were hitters and were the only ones able to produce WAR’s over 8. So that crops out my biases against paying pitchers more than hitters, ask yourselves should Trevor Bauer be paid the same or even more then Mike Trout?
Bauer’s Track Record
Trevor Bauer was nothing short of excellent in 2018 putting up an ERA of 2.21 and in 2020 when he won the CY Young with an ERA of 1.73 in the shortened season. Outside of those two seasons what really warrants a contract paying him $37 million a year? He has a career ERA of 3.90, has only broken the 200 inning mark once, which was in 2019 and has only broke 200 strikeouts twice in his career. Now let's compare that to Gerrit Cole, whose contract Bauer wants to break. Cole has a career ERA of a 3.19, has broken 200 innings in 4 of his past 5 seasons (not counting last year due to the shortened season however he was on pace to reach that mark), and has struck out over 200 in season times, striking out 326 guys in 2019. I use Gerrit Cole not to make him a standard of being better than Bauer but using him as a benchmark to see what warrants the contract that he got and what Bauer seeks.
Strength of Schedule
We look back to Trevor Bauer’s past season where he dominated and won a CY Young. To be quite honest this season came as a surprise, sure we know Bauer has the stuff to be great but this was an overkill for a season. The reasoning behind that may be quite obvious and should be seriously put into consideration when looking at Bauer’s success last season. The offense found in the NL central last season was just non-existent. Easily the worst offensive division in baseball (ESPN Rankings: Cubs-27, Cardinals-22, Brewers-26, Pirates-28), the only worse team being his own, the Reds (30) and the AL Central, outside of the White Sox all ranked in the bottom half of the league. Bauer faced the White Sox once and although he pitched well, lost. He faced the Tigers (15) twice, Royals (16) once, Cubs (27) twice, Brewers (26) three times, and the Pirates (28) twice. Bauer really feasted on very weak offenses and this should be taken into consideration wherever he goes as next year hopefully expands to 162 games and he will start to have to face teams with stronger lineups outside of his own division.
Bauer’s Baggage
Some fans love him, some hate him. While Bauer is fun and good for baseball with the content he brings (I’m personally wishy washy), he does offer a lot of baggage for the front office and fans to deal with. He is very vocal about what he is thinking as we have seen him confront with reporters and even verbally attack the commissioner himself, there does not seem to be a filter for what he wants to say and teams will be cautious about that since one wrong thing said could reflect poorly on the management and ownership, especially if Bauer becomes unhappy. We have also seen Bauer attack other players online such as the individual members of the Astro’s organization, which in the long run who knows what the effect will be if say the team Bauer is on has a desire to try and sign or trade for someone that has been or will future have tensions with Bauer. We have also seen Bauer fight with users and we refer you to this article (https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/01/09/indians-trevor-bauer-college-student-twitter-exchange-harassment)
where it shows you a time where Bauer harassed a college student. What a weird situation that was, quite uncomfortable for the time for baseball twitter. And as I am sure we do not have to remind you about the time Bauer threw a fit on the mound and threw a ball over the center field fence after being pulled from a game back in 2019. All of these things are things that should certainly drive Bauer’s price down when it comes down to negotiating because teams are going to HAVE to be cognizant about these factors and how it could impact their club bringing him in. Front offices don’t like baggage because fans will turn if things go south and it is very difficult to make a prospect of a great fit a deal that would break records, money wise, if there is a chance that it could go array.
Like I said though, I do not believe that Bauer can not live up to the expectations of what the $37+ million dollar pitcher should be, however I do not believe his past track record and personality warrants it right now. Teams will take all the factors and put that into consideration but I think it would be crazy to give him that type of money right now. You get what you get with a wild card, it can be electric and all sorts of hype but it also could be absolute chaos. Could we see him take a 1 year deal to prove he is really worth that type of money? Bauer certainly thinks that he is worth it unless he just uses this as a ploy along with his other tactics such as teasing the fans to drive his price up. Bauer came into his free agency on a sweet deal, coming off a CY Young in a shortened season and being pretty much the only “tier 1” pitcher available in free agency, however owners are coming off a season where they lost a lot of money and have been clearly hesitant to spend, so it should be interesting to see where the two sides meet and where Bauer will be pitching this upcoming season along with for how much.
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terrible article. be better. haha jk ! wow!