re: DAT 7/30: Astros (Verlander) @ Indians (Bieber) 6:10 CT AT&T SW

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He graduated high school half a year early, because he despised it, and enrolled at UCLA as a mechanical engineering major before the 2009 season. The team’s coach, John Savage, had told him he could continue to handle his own development and training as long as it kept working. 

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Another top pitching recruit, a strapping Orange County kid named Gerrit Cole, wasn’t on board. A few weeks into school, as Bauer tells it, Cole reamed him out in front of the whole team in the weight room for not following the same program as everybody else; while they lifted heavy weights, he did his own mobility exercises and wiggled his shoulder tube. “He told me in front of everybody that I had no future in baseball, that I didn’t work hard, and that I’m a p----,” Bauer says. “I was like, ‘F--- you, Gerrit.’?” 

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The two essentially didn’t talk for their remaining three years in Westwood—even when they were juniors, when Bauer had a 1.25 ERA and won the Golden Spikes award as the country’s best amateur. They didn’t talk even after Cole was drafted No. 1 overall by the Pirates in 2011 and Bauer went No. 3 to the Diamondbacks. They didn’t talk, in fact, until last year’s UCLA alumni game, when they chatted for 20 minutes about arbitration and Cole’s new team, the Astros. It was, Bauer reports, cordial. Cole said through a rep, “I have a role as a leader on any team I play for, and that is something I take great pride in. There is also a confidentiality with being a great teammate, which I will always uphold. It makes me happy to see fellow Bruins finding success, and they will forever be my teammates.”

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The Indians tried to change him too, if more modestly. A few years ago, Bauer says, Mickey Callaway—then the Tribe’s pitching coach, now the Mets’ manager—berated him during batting practice for nearly an hour for refusing to throw more fastballs. Callaway had a point: Bauer’s career ERA was around 4.50. Bauer had a point too. “My process has been the same the entire time,” he says. “I’m going to try to find every single way to do better, and I’ve probably researched it more than you have. Don’t tell me what I do and don’t know without some good f---ing data behind it.”

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