Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychology professor and the author of Choke, says the yips are tied to a switch from subconscious to conscious thinking.
“When people are watching you, you start watching yourself,” Beilock says.1
The problem may be more about the environment than the performer. So in the winter of 2016–2017, with Buckel having suffered through four years of not being able to throw strikes, Bauer turned the lights off in the Driveline R&D building. In the dark there would be no visible environment at all. The space was completely black save for a red laser dot, a command trainer, to throw toward. No one could watch Buckel throw. No one could see the results.
Driveline data showed that Buckel’s strike rate rose from 50 to 60 percent during his time at the facility. Boddy sent video and velocity and spin-rate readings to teams, and in January 2017, the Angels saw it and signed Buckel to a minor-league deal. But when he returned to game conditions, when people began to watch him in the fishbowl that is the center of a baseball diamond, the mental block returned.
After twenty-one walks in 20 2/3 Double-A innings, he walked away, finished as a professional pitcher.
“It got to the point where I was basically enjoying training way more than I was competing,” he says. But while his pitching career is over, his baseball career is just beginning: he’s become a conduit in the minors, first for the Mariners and now for Cleveland.
Bauer knows the mindset that’s required to execute a pitch. The challenge is training that mindset and consistently bringing it to a professional pitching mound.
At Driveline, Bauer and others play what he calls mini-games to hasten motor learning related to command. In one such game at Driveline, Kyle Boddy would stand about forty feet away, yell ‘Go!,’ and throw a large rubber ball up in the air. With his back turned, Bauer would pivot, try to locate the ball in the air, and hit it before it landed. The activity removed conscious thought. It was another drill designed to try to cure Buckel. Not every experiment was a success. But he had helped Tomlin in 2018. He was always talking to Clevinger. He educated Adam Plutko about spin axis. And after watching new reliever Neil Ramírez for several weeks after he joined the team in May, he approached Ramírez about developing a new pitch.
“I think we were just in the dugout, on the railing [watching a game],” recalls Ramírez. “[Bauer said], ‘Hey, I was kind of looking at your numbers of your stuff.’ I think I had approached him about a split-finger. [He said], ‘I think curveball would be a better pitch.’”
Ramírez had a good fastball with above-average spin (2,436 rpm) and speed (95.3 mph), and an adequate slider. Bauer thought he needed a vertical breaking ball.
“If you add an elite breaking ball and you tell [Ramírez] to throw his fastball 40 percent of the time, he becomes an elite pitcher,” Bauer says.
There are many coaches in professional and amateur baseball who doubt the viability of creating an above-average breaking pitch from scratch. Some think the feel for spin is innate. Bauer’s own experience suggests that fixed mindset is wrong.
Ramírez was perhaps more open-minded compared to other pitchers, as he was desperate to remain in the majors and had added 2 mph to his fastball (93.1 mph in 2017 to 95.3 mph in 2018) the previous winter through a weighted-ball program led by Caleb Cotham, who then worked at The Bledsoe Agency. Cotham, a former professional pitcher and Driveline alumnus, suggested that Ramírez reach out to Bauer when the Indians called him up from Triple-A in May to reinforce their tattered relief corps.
“I like Bauer, man. I will come in after a game and he’ll [joke], ‘You were only throwing 94 mph tonight, you pussy,’” says Ramírez, who chuckles. “I don’t put anyone into a label or box until I get to know them. Bauer is a guy that goes out there and competes every five days and competes his butt off. That’s what I saw on the outside and that’s what I’ve seen [in Cleveland].… People fear what they don’t understand.”
They had begun to work on the pitch prior to the All-Star break, including training an Edgertronic camera on Ramírez’s nascent curveball grip. Ramírez played catch with Bauer, experimenting with grips. To help with the pitch creation, Bauer also taught Ramírez about the concept of elbow spiral to improve his arm action.
Bauer’s delivery is different from most pitchers’. It almost looks like he’s throwing a football. As he takes the ball from his glove to begin his delivery, he does not extend his pitching arm away from his body toward second base. For Bauer, that’s all wasted movement causing unneeded stress. Rather, when Bauer takes the ball from his glove, he keeps the ball close to his body by moving his throwing elbow back toward first base, his forearm parallel to the ground. As his left foot strikes before the mound, his forearm pivots upward to a 90 degree angle so his hand and the ball are in a position not too different from a quarterback holding a ball near his ear. It’s compact. It’s efficient. It’s called an elbow spiral because the elbow takes a spiral-stairwell-like journey to a readied throwing position.
Boddy and the Driveline crew stumbled upon the idea of the elbow spiral in a book on pitching mechanics by Japanese instructor Kazushi Tezuka, with a title translated as The Identity of Pitching. There was no English-language translation of the book available, so Boddy paid to have one done. Driveline staff modified Tezuka’s idea of the elbow spiral but believed the underlying concept of “marrying external rotation to supination” was unique and “led to a more efficient arm path.” Bauer shortened his arm action through drills he picked up at Driveline, including the pivot pick, but he says he had arrived at this arm action mostly naturally, “likely because of my high volume of throwing from a young age. Natural adaptation to handle the workload.” Bauer calls that lack of backward movement with the ball a “neutral position.” He felt the movement kept him healthier than most pitchers. He’d never been placed on the injured list or missed a start.
Conversely, Ramírez had an exaggerated arm action that was negatively affecting his ability to throw a quality curveball. When he extended his pitching hand toward second base, he was pronating his arm, then supinating it, before going through pronation again as he moved forward to release.
In other words, Bauer explains, “There’s a lot of moving parts there.” But with the elbow spiral, a pitcher never reaches a pronated position until he’s releasing the pitch.
The new breaking ball was getting close, Bauer believed. But the project was shut down because the coaching staff believed it could have a negative effect on Ramírez’s slider. (If anything, Bauer felt it would be useful differential training.) Ramírez acquiesced to the club’s request. He didn’t want to go against the Indians’ coaching staff. But Ramírez says he made the development of a curveball, and mastering the elbow spiral, off-season priorities at the Bledsoe pitching lab.
Bauer’s assistance extended beyond teammates. That summer, he also met with Indians front-office officials who were interested in outfitting Progressive Field with Edgertronic cameras in 2019. They wanted to know where and how to employ them in the stadium. When the Indians sent minor-league pitching coordinator Ruben Niebla to the major-league clubhouse to talk to Bauer about pitch design and some minor leaguers who could benefit from new pitches, Bauer spent nearly the entirety of a game along the dugout railing discussing pitch-design principles. He felt more and more that he was having productive dialogue with the team and that what he had to say was valued.
Bauer thought he could teach Ramírez the curveball relatively quickly. He believed the concept behind velocity creation was simple. “Try to throw the ball hard and your body figures it out,” Bauer says. The summer of 2018 supplied more evidence that this was true.
In the spring of 2016, the Dodgers wanted to experiment. They gave Boddy, who was consulting for the club, guinea pigs to work with: ten of their lowest-regarded minor-league pitchers held back from affiliated ball. The pitchers were invited for an involuntary extended stay at the Dodgers’ Camelback Ranch complex just west of Phoenix to see i
f Boddy’s Driveline team could add velocity. Two of the experimentees were Andrew Istler, the 702nd player taken in the previous draft, who had produced an 8.38 ERA in Rookie ball, and Corey Copping, the 942nd player in the same draft, out of Oklahoma University. Istler had topped out at 88 mph in college, Copping at 90 mph.
“We were in our own little world, pretty much,” Copping says. “They told me I wasn’t going to make an affiliate and that I was going to be in extended spring training.… [Driveline] came down. They made us use these wrist weights and weighted balls, which I’ve never in my life done before. That was definitely new to me.”
After their extended spring with Boddy, they had enjoyed velocity and performance jumps that continued through the summer of 2018, when they become something more: prospects and trade deadline assets.
On July 31, the Dodgers traded Copping to Toronto for reliever John Axford to bolster their bullpen with an eye on October. On August 31, the Dodgers traded Istler to the Nationals for Ryan Madson, who would become Dodgers manager Dave Roberts’ most trusted setup man.
“It was free money,” Boddy says of the velocity improvement.
Boddy and Bauer had proven velocity could be bolstered and pitches could be taught. Command was trickier. While Bauer had slowly and steadily improved, cutting his walk rate from 10.6 percent in 2015 to 8.6 percent in 2016 to 8 percent in 2017 to 7.5 percent in the first half of 2018, there hadn’t been a breakthrough like he’d had with his slider or with his velocity gain in 2014. In August, Bauer’s command would begin to waver, and he would experiment with a more forceful remedy.
On August 6 at Progressive Field, Bauer’s narrow-external focus was slipping into something more internal.
“I’m getting close to Ken Giles-ing myself,” said Bauer while at breakfast with his parents a day after the appearance, referencing the Houston Astros reliever who punched himself in the face after a poor outing earlier in the season. “Last night it happened twice, where I completely lost the ability to throw strikes.”
The first occasion was in the second inning against the Twins. Bauer walked Max Kepler on five pitches, with the fourth ball, a fastball, sailing high and outside. Bauer proceeded to throw three straight pitches out of the zone against the following batter, Logan Forsythe. Bauer stepped off the mound. He took off his hat, wiped his brow with his jersey sleeve, and stepped back on. He threw three straight strikes, including a perfectly placed 95 mph fastball on the corner that Forsythe swung at and missed for a strikeout.
How did he lose his command and then so quickly regain it?
“I started spraying balls and then all of a sudden I throw three straight in the same damn spot,” Bauer said. “A lot of times I have to literally slap myself to distract myself… from whatever is going on. The body gets out of its parasympathetic nervous system. Or is it the sympathetic nervous system? One of them shuts down. It’s complicated.”
If Bauer loses feel for pitching in an inning, he’ll sometimes leave the dugout during the next half inning and throw some Plyo balls to try to remove the feeling of throwing a baseball and get his feel back on track. He’s also explored the benefits of slapping himself in the face to reorganize his mental focus.
Kathy Bauer, Trevor’s mom, explains the sympathetic nervous system in more relatable terms, saying it’s responsible for fight or flight, controlling the body’s responses to a perceived threat.
She says there was another recent example of Trevor’s subconscious at play. At home against the Pirates on July 25, Bauer threw a first-inning, 94 mph fastball to the Pirates’ Gregory Polanco. The pitch was supposed to be down and in to the left-handed-hitting Polanco, but it drifted out over the plate. In the first-inning afternoon sunlight, Polanco stung a ball right back at Bauer, who barely avoided taking a line drive to the face. Indians shortstop Francisco Lindor was positioned behind Bauer in an infield shift, and he fielded the one-bouncer to end the inning.
But when Bauer came out for the second inning, his velocity was down as far as it had been since an April start in frigid weather against the Royals. He threw a 91.7 mph fastball to Josh Bell and another one at the same speed to Colin Moran. His fastball averaged 94.6 mph for the season.
“[Polanco’s hit] goes between my glove and my face. It was the last pitch I threw,” Bauer says. “I go down to the dugout. I remember feeling extremely tired. Feeling not all there. I felt great the first inning. I go out for the second inning and I am throwing 90. I felt sluggish.” The game’s velocity plot reveals the sudden dip. “Carl [Willis] thought I was hurt. After the inning he goes, ‘Hey, are you OK?’” I say, ‘Yeah, my body went to sleep for some reason.’ Your body freaks out. Something happens.… I’m just starting to play around with this.”
After the second inning, Bauer went into an area behind the dugout hidden from cameras and slapped himself in the face—what he calls a velo slap (short for velocity).
“I literally slapped myself across the face,” Bauer says. “You have to get out of that mindset.”
After the top of the third inning, Bauer approached Mike Clevinger in the home dugout.
“Where were you after the second inning?” he asked.
“I was in the clubhouse,” Clevinger says. “Why?”
“Well, you missed your chance to velo slap me,” Bauer told him.
Clevinger seemed sincerely disappointed to have missed the opportunity to slap Bauer across the face.
In the off-season at Driveline, if someone is just shy of challenging his velocity record, a training partner will slap him forcefully. “[You] slap the shit out of them,” Warren says.
“You get an immediate adrenaline rush,” Trevor explains. “A lot of times you will jump 2 mph.”
The velo slap might also be useful to hone command.
On August 6, the Indians were leading the Twins 6–0 with two outs in the sixth inning as Bauer prepared to make a 3–1 pitch to Miguel Sanó. For the second time in that outing, his command left him. Bauer threw a 97 mph fastball that missed low below the zone. He walked off the mound in his white game jersey with his red socks pulled high, covered his mouth with his glove, and screamed “Fuck!” The word was uttered loudly enough to be audible in the press box. Willis made his way to the center of the mound. Bauer was seething. Although the game was essentially over and the AL Central was all but decided, the AL Cy Young race was not.
“I was thinking, ‘I have a great FIP going on right now. Goddammit. It just cost me,’” Bauer says.
Approaching the mound, Willis saw the rage on Bauer’s face. He understood why he was upset. Willis laughed.
“I’m super mad,” Bauer says. “He comes out, sees it, he just kind of laughs and says, ‘Well this guy is a low-ball hitter, well, just stay behind the ball.’”
We ask Bauer if he’s thinking about FanGraphs’ version of Wins Above Replacement in real time during games. FanGraphs’ WAR formula uses FIP to determine a pitcher’s run-prevention ability independent of the defense behind him. Walks are a significant part of the formula.
“Of course, always,” Warren interjects with a laugh. “The only thing he thinks about more is strikeouts, because strikeouts preceded FanGraphs WAR.”
Was there value in a mound visit? Especially when a pitching coach with a traditional background like the gray-bearded Willis visits Bauer? Warren answers again.
“Most really good pitching mound visits have nothing to do with pitching,” he says. “If you are going out there to talk about pitching, you might as well take him out of the game.… Mechanical [adjustments] are taking them out of the mindset they need to compete out there.”
Trevor speaks up.
“I will tell you about the best mound visit I ever heard of, courtesy of Brent Strom,” he says. “He’s the pitching coach somewhere. They have a rookie out there who is making his second start in the big leagues. Walk. Walk. Hit. It’s one of those types of innings. He loads the bases with one out. The manager is like, ‘Brent, go talk to him.’ Brent
thinks, ‘I don’t know this kid at all. Can’t talk about approach.’ So I pinch my ass cheeks together, and I walk out to the mound. I go, ‘Hey, kid, I am going to shit my pants if you don’t get out of this inning, but I can’t go to the restroom until you get out of this. So I need to get out of this real quick.’ He pinches his ass cheeks together and walks back to the dugout. Two pitches later, a double play gets [him] out of it.”
Strom had flipped the focus back to narrow-external.
Maybe Willis’s amusement at Bauer’s FIP-tallying against the Twins had refocused him and broken a mild mental block. Bauer went to 3–2 on the next batter, Max Kepler. On the full-count pitch, he dotted the outside corner for a strikeout: his last batter of the outing. Bauer had entered the game neck and neck with Chris Sale for the AL WAR lead. He left the start with a 5.7 to 5.6 edge.
Bauer threw seven shutout innings, striking out eleven, including his two hundredth K of the season. He reached that landmark in the third inning, when he got Twins catcher Bobby Wilson looking at a comeback Laminar Express. He received a standing ovation from the crowd, which Warren was on hand for as he sat in the scout seating behind home plate. He had traveled with the Edgertronic camera to film the start. Before the game, he mounted it on a railing behind home plate, in front of the first row of seating. During the game, he monitored and edited video in real time on his laptop in the scout section. We asked Warren how often scouts have approached him and asked what he’s doing and what type of camera he’s using. “One guy a few years ago wanted to know,” Warren said. That was it.
In the midst of his best season, after arguably the best month of his professional career, Bauer knew what he needed to get back: consistent feel for command. He had to get his subconscious in order, and his focus—more specifically, his narrow-external focus. He needed a good differential bullpen. He wouldn’t get the chance.
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PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DATA
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