re: Dodgers' Trevor Bauer accused of assault

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1. he lives outside the normal box.
2. he beat lsu

the old guard passed on him because he has a unique warmup routine.

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he's actually hated here for bashing the Stros while admittedly cheating with stickytac. him and Bregman have beef too.

oh and there is this

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Bauer's initial charge was leveled at Justin Verlander, who Bauer said increased his spin rate after a trade to the Astros:

he tweeted his curiosity about how a pitcher could “bump his spin rate a couple hundred rpm overnight … imagine the steals you could get on the trade market!”

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In that same article, Bauer has this to say about spin rate:

So I asked Bauer, “If people now are learning how to throw harder, how can they learn to spin a four-seam fastball faster to create the ‘life’ everybody wants on their heater?”

Bauer essentially told me it couldn’t be done. He explained that when you backspin the ball with your hand directly behind the ball—not to the side, or not with any degree of side spin—there’s nothing you can do about making it spin appreciably faster. Your spin rate on your best fastball is like your fingerprint—it is what it is.

Pitching labs have since figured out there is a way to improve the spin rate: load up pine tar or a similar sticky substance on your fingers.

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First, some facts on that initial accusation. Verlander's spin rate "jumped" from 2538 to 2569 rpm after the trade. It jumped less than 100 rpm from 2017 to 2018. Bauer's real beef seems to have been with Gerrit Cole, who saw a ~150 rpm increase on his fastball after being traded to the Astros. So let's take this along with Bauer's quote above and put down our hypothesis: based on Trevor Bauer's own words, a jump of ~100 to "a couple hundred" rpm indicates a pitcher is using an illegal foreign substance.

Now let's look at Trevor Bauer's spin rates. Here are Bauer's 2020 spin rates, with the mean and standard deviation for each pitch from 2015 through 2019 in parentheses and the difference between 2020 and his previous mean in bold. All numbers are from baseball savant.

Changeup: 1413 (1716 +/- 85) 303

Curve: 2933 (2522 +/- 75) 411

Cutter: 2907 (2500 +/- 177) 407

4-seamer: 2775 (2296 +/- 74) 479

Sinker: 2802 (2269 +/- 65) 533

Slider: 2942 (2496 +/- 297) 446

So to recap, Trevor Bauer himself believes jumps of "a couple hundred" rpms are physically impossible without cheating. In 2020, he was able to change the rpms of literally every pitch he throws by 300 - 500 rpms.

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so he's also a huge hypocrite