When it comes to Trevor Bauer, the juice is worth the squeeze

Editor's note: This article was published before the reported three-team trade sending Trevor Bauer to the Cincinnati Reds.

Warning: Story contains coarse language

Watching Trevor Bauer wheel around and toss a perfect strike into center field at Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium on Sunday night, I instantly flashed back to one of our conversations in 2011.

Then a junior at UCLA - a spectacular one, on his way to multiple player-of-the-year honors - Bauer was a budding, bristling enigma. He had been isolated on his Hart (Calif.) High School baseball team, and it turned out that Bauer was also a loner in his college clubhouse, at odds with most of the Bruins, particularly fellow star pitcher Gerrit Cole.

Bauer never bought into the myth of baseball, nor its believers.

"The 'baseball gods,' the eye black, the whole wearing the same sliding shorts while you're on a roll, getting rid of your hat, whatever all that stuff is, that's never clicked with me," he told me back then, when I covered UCLA for the Los Angeles Daily News. "I just don't understand how wearing the same hat when you're in the dugout is going to affect what's on the field. I'm not a believer in it. I'm more of a scientist out there, looking to try to master the game, to be as close to perfect as I can."

That year, he was damn close. He went on to win the Golden Spikes Award as the best player in college baseball after a 13-2 season with a 1.25 ERA and a conference-record 203 strikeouts. He ended the year with nine straight complete games.

Which brings us back to Sunday night, when he was anything but complete.

As Cleveland Indians manager Terry Francona approached the pitcher’s mound in the bottom of the fifth inning, after his starter coughed up what had been a 5-3 lead over the Royals, Bauer's frustration with himself - and with some of the bad luck that conspired against him in the inning - boiled over. Instead of handing the ball to his erstwhile manager, he turned around and heaved it toward Kansas City's eastern suburbs. Francona, no stranger to enigmatic pitchers, met him at the mound, looked him in the eye, and asked the question that so many have asked of Trevor Bauer: "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

There's no easy answer. Or, perhaps, there is no answer. But it's worth asking because Bauer is worth the headache - for the Indians, if they hold onto him, and for a handful of other teams as Wednesday’s 4 p.m. ET trade deadline approaches.

He may or may not be on the market. With the Indians soaring up the standings after a slow start - once 34-33, Cleveland is on a 28-10 run and closing on the Minnesota Twins in the American League Central - they could hold on to their mercurial star and vie for a playoff spot. But if they decide someone else can try to solve that riddle, another team will get one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Bauer has an arsenal of quality pitches, yet sometimes overthinks things down to the molecule. For all his prodigious talents, Bauer is just 68-55 in his career with a 3.92 ERA. He seemed to put everything together in 2018. He went 12-6 with a 2.21 ERA and a 2.44 FIP and entered the Cy Young discussion before a line drive struck him in the ankle, resulting in a stress fracture that shortened his season. He came into this season as a Cy Young Award favorite but has been woefully inconsistent, allowing one or fewer runs in 10 of his 24 starts and five or more runs in six starts.

He could be the best pitcher in baseball in the final two months of the season, or he could flame out. Either option is viable.

But that's just on the field.

Off the field, you know what you're getting: a headache. A clubhouse conundrum who's more apt to play with a drone or instigate a Twitter war than join a game of poker.

Of course, this is not new.

"I wasn't the one to go out and go to movies with people. I would've rather been at the park working out," Bauer told me in 2011. "Because of things like that, when I went to school, I didn't know a lot of people, and the people I did know didn't know how to react to me because we didn't spend time together. That's one of the reasons I didn't like high school. I didn't fit in. I didn't have a niche. ... When I'd go to the field, people were still making fun of me for the way I did things."

And not just teammates. Bauer recalled one coach ridiculing his non-traditional equipment.

"Coaches were making fun of me for the way I did things,” he said. "There was a JV coach, and when I was a freshman, he'd tell all the players, 'That pole he carries around is just to compensate for other stuff.'"

Francona is not alone in encountering moments when he can't comprehend Bauer. Come Thursday, maybe another MLB manager will be fortunate enough to inherit that confusion.

Those numbers from college and from 2018 are no mirage. For the team that unlocks Bauer's potential, it'll all be worth it.