Vlogball — Trevor Bauer’s Revolution
Trevor Bauer as a young child (@BauerOutage/X)
“To me the ideal film - which I’ve never succeeded in making - would be as though the reel were behind one’s eyes and you were projecting it yourself, seeing what you wish to see. This has a great deal in common with thought processes… That’s why I think the camera is an eye as well as a mind. Everything we do with the camera has physiological and mental significance.”
- John Huston
A paradigm shift isn’t the transition from horse-drawn buggies to highways, it’s the combustion engine behind it. Jazz was a paradigm shift because it could substitute for the word “music” itself, expressing not merely a variety, but an outcome. Jazz is the dissonant, syncopated, yet-everything's-harmonic of getting different languages to discourse through brass in the wrought iron, humidsphere of New Orleans. This is how a thing becomes enduring – it is born as an expression of an innate longing to connect. Next time you hear a harsh noise, such as the snarling metal of a lawn mower while meditating in the morning, try harmonizing with it, instead, via some hum of a third up an octave. It changes the moment from noise to sound. In the end, the coolest and most enduring things are those that take the mundane exactly as it is, and by that acceptance, transmute it into joy.
Jump with me, still. What is the outcome of sports entertainment – is it to bring joy, wring excitement, or burn time? We have our network television and their regional affiliates; we have our beloved broadcasters. Some players even have YouTube channels that give me the behind-the-scenes intimacy I crave as a fan. My brother-in-law put it well when he quipped, “the thing I look forward to most each week in winter is the NFL's Mic’d up”. I agree, there’s something about hearing the voices of giants; it doesn’t spoil the enchantment. It enlarges the mystery by bringing it closer to your field of view. When you’re a young kid dreaming of playing center field for the Red Sox, loading up your kid-size suitcase, pretending like you’re flying on the team airplane for a series in Tampa, moments like Mic’d up deliver awe even more than the jaw-drop of Web Gems – they pull you in close to the story.
I think the outcome of sports entertainment isn’t to be merely entertained – it’s the heroic narrative, condensed. The storytelling of that hero’s journey transmits joy, and in turn, a better and more intimate understanding of the infinite. If that seems lofty – Red Sox fans, how did you feel in 2004 when Dave Roberts stole second base? Bronx faithful, what’s it like to hear the haunting, warm broadcast crackle of Gehrig, as he says, “Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth”? The awe of stepping through the tunnel from the concourse, seeing the pristine green and terraced mountains of stadium seats roar up around you, the called third strike with runners at the corners, the feeling of ghosts walking out from the cornfields of Iowa like smoke – this is the enchantment of baseball that turns daily noise into music. I submit that baseball, like music, like all enduring things that expand our language, isn’t a fad that can be captured and packaged, but a story that desires to unfold. And today, baseball needs jazz: a new paradigm to communicate the infinite.
MLB seems to have pivoted to the fan in a way that puts the onus of entertainment on attention span and dopamine. It tried to shorten the game with the pitch clock and increase offense with bigger bases and more hittable pitches (banning ‘sticky stuff’) in 2023. To MLB’s credit, its efforts have regional sports networks up +3% in viewership over 2022, even though those networks have lost 7-13% in subscribers year-over-year. With the banning of the shift, too, lefty batting averages on balls in play (BABIP) are up 40 points in 2023. With baseball streaming on Apple TV, Peacock, and Fubo, games are reaching more homes in more ways.
Yet, Pitcher injuries are at an all-time high where some blame lays at the feet of a faster pace game and slippery baseballs, which tendons have to grip harder to hold onto. Some blame dubiously falls on a culture of throwing with faster velocity, encouraged from a young age.
With the stars of the mound falling like flies to Tommy John, and MLB doing everything it can to attract viewers with more excitement in a shorter time span, it seems like baseball is trying to repackage its brand to appear better. Back to paradigm shifts. Over time, country songs have shorter guitar solos, but they’re still country songs. In Manfred’s baseball, there are shorter games, but is turning the dials of attention and excitement to bump viewership 3% going to reverse the decline in kids playing Little League? What if a paradigm shift in baseball isn’t about buying eyes, but about making people fall in love? What if that’s where the jazz is – in the way we speak the game?
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In part one, I analyzed Trevor Bauer’s legal headlines, and shared how my opinion of him has reversed. Upon inspection, it appears that Bauer has been wronged by fraudulent accusers and publicly buried under the burden of proof of having to debunk each tabloid-cast aspersion, ad nauseam. Even if you haven’t read the first article, or even if digging into the facts provided seems like a rabbit hole you’d rather not go into, no worries, but it’s at least interesting that Marcell Ozuna, Julio Urías, and Domingo Germán have all been tried and convicted of domestic abuse – Bauer wasn’t even charged – and have retained MLB contracts. Bauer’s been banned from the MLB, and now that he’s not, no team will touch him.
That didn’t stop him. Locked out and ostensibly alone, Bauer has the innate desire to communicate. To allude again to his appearance on the Theo Von podcast, Bauer explains, “baseball doesn’t have the cool factor that NBA has. NBA has sneakers, and rap culture, pop culture. They blended the two together in a very cool way. So when you’re going through highschool and you’re trying to figure out who you are, you want to be part of the cool crowd”. He goes on to note how baseball lacks the panache of a Steph Curry no-look three clip that goes viral on TikTok. To him, the baseball entertainment problem isn’t simply that age-old, three line conversation the commissioner fears it is:
“Oh you like baseball?”
‘Yeah, huge fan.’
“I mean, I like baseball, but it’s just so long.”
To Bauer, attention spans aren’t the only knob to turn in getting baseball viewership up. That’s just the nature of the game. The real frontier – that has yet to be explored – is to bring the cool factor – that is to say, the personal, heroic narrative – to every home in a way never before seen on network TV.
I dove into Bauer’s vlog on his YouTube channel. It wasn’t like Steph Curry’s, which felt like the typical, groomed content repo – safe takes and interviews that didn’t make you feel like Steph was really there in the comments. No knock to Steph, it just felt like someone was making a director’s cut of Steph Curry making a vlog. Back to Bauer’s page. I clicked on the first video I saw (14 Ks for the Diablos Rojos) and didn’t resurface until the early morning hours.
On a scale of Anthony Bourdain to some galumph bumbling up against trite cultural differences, Bauer is 100% his own story. You’re with him every step of the way. Here’s what I learned about what Bauer brings to baseball from a few days of watching his vlog:
Global Traveler
The MLB tries to be international with games at odd times while Bauer is an ambassador for the sport, naturally. He has an entire series dedicated to both his tours of playing in Japan and Mexico. Want to chill with Robinson Cano on a humid night in the Yucatán peninsula? Grab a seat. Want to learn from the now-American-renown pitching philosopher, Shota Imanaga? Hang with Bauer while he does his warm ups and plays catch next to him. Bauer walks you through each facility he enters, studies the swatting, leveled swing paths of Japanese hitters, and then when he encounters a former NPB player in a Mexican batter’s box, he discusses his change of sequence to land under that flatter bat path – all while he’s on the mound, telling you to buy his “Sword” merch.
Physical Therapist
In a plague of elbow injury headlines, Bauer represents hope. He looks directly in the camera and catches you off guard, telling kids to throw as hard as they can, how striking people out is the entire point of pitching. There’s something invigorating about the truth. Bauer’s workout routines remind me of Athlean-X episodes or other YouTube channels I watch as a weight lifter and amateur athlete. His knowledge of shoulder-rounding and scapular strengthening with elastic bands, his rotator cuff tossing with his mini medball, his analytics-driven intelligence with 4App, tracking every moment of his day to be a durable, 4-day pitcher – Bauer gives me a new confidence that pitchers aren’t just finicky race horses with glass elbows. He shows they can be scientific stewards of the bodies they occupy. After his hip injury from a throwing error while playing for the Baystars in Japan, he got right onto the vlog, walking back through footage, notes, and 4App, tracking the exact moment in time that led him to injury. I wonder if the Tommy John trend goes down if more pitchers get the knowledge Trevor gives.
Pitching Master
Before my son (hopefully) plays baseball, I need to clip every insight on mechanics and mound strategy I’ve learned from Bauer’s channel. For free, he provides a master class – often from the mound itself, mid-game – on pitch sequences, shapes, pausing to walk you through the intuition behind them. Learning from him has that feel of watching Prince play guitar – there’s clearly skill, but the enthusiasm is contagious, too. I found myself laughing out loud like a kid again as the lightbulb would go off for the first time in my life on why I couldn’t generate enough velocity when I pitched in high school. Helpfully, he talks about the generation of force from creating separation between torso and hip rotation and stomping hard with the plant foot. It’s like your favorite pitching coach YouTube channel had a mechanical engineering degree and a Cy Young award (Bauer has both). Bauer possesses not only the skill, but the humility to share it with young kids he’s never met before at a game one night in Japan.
His description of opening the hips before the shoulder and letting steady-headed eyes guide mechanics checked out with a machine learning application I’d heard about from a developer that was working on it – Mustard. The developer told me how Mustard bases training data off of animals in nature, like cheetahs running after prey, noting how they have steady, level heads, and that this posture drives a perfect alignment model for athletic form. Just killing time in the Mexican dusk, Bauer opens up to a teammate with his invaluable expertise on this exact topic. Again, he’s not being paid a flashy MLB salary. He’s just sharing himself for the love of the game. I’m not trying to wax poetic, Bauer does that himself. Watch this clip of the end of his video about his injury in Japan. He’s unabashedly taking you into the hyper-real hero’s quest we all wanted in baseball but only saw in October.
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Jazz has this, as above, so below aspect, where it mirrors what makes it – where the brass and strings and reeds make circles out of tangents – seeming contradictions woven as colliding harmonies borne of cross-lingual players. Similarly, Bauer’s love for the game seeps through his vital knowledge of the human body and his regard for pitching as an art form, so much so that maybe this is how he stays mentally and physically healthy – he puts himself in alignment with his body, letting the eyes guide him. Indeed, he lets the eyes looking into the other side of the camera lens guide him as he walks through unedited reality. It’s almost like the backwards take of the MLB’s attitude towards viewership – trying to guide the eyes, instead. As above, so below. Bauer’s humble love of the game of baseball draws the viewer closely. You’re there watching not because he’s trying to make you look, but because you know you’re walking somewhere together in a larger story. Neither of you knows how it’ll turn out.
It can seem that I like Bauer a lot. I think that’s the point of the piece, rather than its weakness. I’m just opening my heart up, turning into content without pretense the story of how I was moved from hatred to joy about another person. I think that’s pretty cool, especially nowadays.
The great director John Huston’s quote on ‘the ideal film’ is interesting here. To paraphrase, the camera is consciousness; every edit is a blink. So it is with Bauer. You can’t wait to see where he goes next, and you begin to trust him like you would a good director of film. The film isn’t good because it checks boxes in a rubric. The film is great because it’s a story you’re moving through, with intuition, suspense, hope, and a little fear that the carriage turns back into a pumpkin. Bauer leaves nothing off the table, however, even if it’s a crippling injury or bad start. You listen in on his self-dialogue of how too good of a bullpen might throw him off his game. Honesty is the only way out for him. Inward. He’s not directing the movie, he’s storytelling, leaving the theater wide open, so you can follow your innate desire to see the hero succeed.
Trevor Bauer’s vlog takes the full plunge into the liminal, the eerie area of being where you’re as real as you believe yourself to be — not only in calling his shot like Ruth did, but narrating in real time what you intend to do, why, and how, fully humbled to the results with a child-like curiosity, no matter what they are. In entertainment, there’s predictions and post-production. Bauer’s channel is neither. It’s a hero’s journey, a self-surrender into the shaman’s tent of the camera lens where you risk everything and open up a new way to be entertained. What is being entertained? No longer is it mere dopamine, nor loyalties to logos and cash. Bauer’s channel drags you on witching hour bus rides in the Mexico midnight to the cool, steel train stops of Japan. He takes you out of the moment you’re in. You root for him before you realize it. He tells you how he is going to set up the batter and does it. He tells you to buy his merchandise, breaking the fourth wall from behind the mound as he breathes in the moment of his next chess move, stepping into the batter’s box, 60 feet away. Bauer doesn’t make fans, he makes followers. His content isn’t stuffing up dopamine receptors with a morphine drip of scroll-buzz. He’s offering himself to you, fully, beckoning for you to take the journey with him — any high, any low.
I’m eager to see if Bauer gets back into the MLB. If he joined the Astros I’d be elated. He’s an ace that cares about the game more than salary. But to me, he’s most valuable for the wisdom he brings to a pitching staff. After the Astros lost Brent Strom to the Diamondbacks by way of retirement, I believe Bauer would bring back the analytic edge to their rotation, as well as a humble, nurturing force that could build others up, let alone pitch a World Series. Here’s to hoping, and here’s to Bauer changing the game of baseball, forever. He’s jazz on the diamond – when you watch him through his own eyes, you can feel the paradigm shift.
Sources:
Forbes – MLB network ratings
YouTube – Theo Von interview of Trevor Bauer
YouTube – Stephen Curry Vlog episode
The Atlanta Journal Constitution – Graph of Little League decline
YouTube – Trevor Bauer’s “My Second Start in Mexico Set Records”
YouTube – Trevor Bauer’s “I Pitched A 10-Inning Shutout… But This Happened!”
YouTube – Trevor Bauer’s “I Faced Our Closest Rivals”
YouTube – Athlean-X “How to Fix Shoulder Pain and Impingement (FOREVER)”
YouTube – Trevor Bauer’s “I Faced The Most Hated Team in Mexico”
YouTube – Trevor Bauer’s “My Season is… Over?”
*Stats are as of 6/11/2024
