Trevor Bauer: Where the Game of Baseball Meets the Business of Baseball
On the third of December in 2013, the New York Mets baseball team released utility infielder Justin Turner.
Turner had been a fringe player for several years with the Mets and the Baltimore Orioles, hitting decently but with little power. He was soon to turn 30, the time when the legs get slower and baseball skills start to decline, and the Mets decided that even though he was making only the minimum salary of about half a million dollars, they could do better by rolling the dice on someone else.
Now it’s important to stress here that this doesn’t mean Justin Turner had been a failure. Anyone with the skills to make a Major League roster is among the few hundred best baseball players in the country. They’re at the far right of the bell curve. Turner was no washout. He wasn’t a mediocrity. He just hadn’t quite cracked the inner circle of the inner circle.
Cut 3,000 miles west to Los Angeles, which is what the Brooklyn Dodgers did in 1958. Oh, no, wait, that’s not my point. In December 2013, the Los Angeles Dodgers were trying to rebuild their team after eight years under the ownership of the miserable weasel Frank McCourt.
So they signed Justin Turner, and the gods smiled on all concerned. Turner played part-time in 2014, enough to earn a starting spot in 2015, and for the next eight seasons he was everything he hadn’t been in New York. He hit for average, he hit for power, he got some nice clutch hits in the post-season. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, he finished top 15 in the voting for the National League’s Most Valuable Player.
He had flaming red hair and an ebullient style. When he liked a pitch, he cocked his left leg before he swung. Fans loved him and there was every indication he loved being in L.A., right down the freeway from his birthplace in Long Beach.
At the end of the 2022 season, Turner’s contract with the Dodgers ran out and he became a free agent. Since he was now almost 39, and this time really had shown signs of slowing down, it was widely assumed he would sign on for a couple more years with the Dodgers, finishing out his career in a place where he had shone most brightly and everybody loved him.
The Dodgers apparently made him an offer. The Boston Red Sox apparently made him a better offer, a potentially two-year deal for more than $21.7 million with $15 million guaranteed. On December 18, Turner signed with the Red Sox.
Asked if he considered staying with the Dodgers, Turner replied, “When you’re with a team that long and going into free agency, you’re always kind of waiting and hoping that they’re in play, but there’s a point that you realize this is a business. They had decisions they had to make. I had decisions I had to make. It just didn’t work out.”
As breakup lines go, dude, that’s cold.
But it would be hard to argue that he’s wrong about the “this is a business” part.
That point was strikingly underscored three weeks later, on Jan. 6, when the same Dodgers announced they were releasing right-handed pitcher Trevor Bauer.
Bauer, for those who don’t follow sordid sex cases involving professional athletes, was at the center of one that was simultaneously sensational and shrouded.
The short version is that in April 2021 Bauer hooked up with a woman he met online, after they agreed they would have what is euphemistically termed “rough sex.” A few weeks after the encounter, in June 2021, she accused him of beating her unconscious and going beyond the boundaries on which they had agreed. He responded everything they did was consensual.
A California District Attorney investigated and declined to recommend criminal charges. Major League Baseball, however, had suspended Bauer when the charge was filed and then did its own investigation, which took nine months. The league ultimately suspended him for 324 games — two seasons — for violating its domestic violence policy.
Bauer appealed and at the end of December an arbitrator reduced the suspension to 194 games, meaning “time served” and making him eligible to pitch at the beginning of the 2023 season.
Viewed purely in a baseball sense, this might sound like good news for the Dodgers. Bauer is a quality starting pitcher, assuming he can shake off the rust from his long hiatus, and like most teams in baseball, the Dodgers could really use another reliable starting pitcher.
Bauer was all of that in the two and a half months he pitched for the Dodgers in early 2021, the first season of a monstrous three-year, $102 million contract.
The last thing the Dodgers wanted at the end of December 2022, however, was for the arbitrator to hand him back, which is where we return to Justin Turner’s point about all this being a business.
From the day the charge surfaced, this case and its implications have sparked a tsunami of discussion, in and outside of baseball. It has been compared to sexual harassment claims against DeShaun Watson, a pro football quarterback who was released by his team, the Houston Texans, and then signed to a $238 million deal by the Cleveland Browns.
Yet for all the millions of words, no one who was not in the room where it happened knows the real story. For obvious and entirely appropriate reasons, all we outsiders know are the he said and the she said. Major League Baseball, which did the most extensive investigation, has kept its full report confidential, saying only that it found enough credible evidence to impose the two-year suspension.
This has led Bauer and his defenders to say that he’s been “tried by media,” and that he would now just like to move on.
But it won’t be with the Dodgers, even though they were apparently ambivalent enough that Bauer says team officials met with him weeks ago to discuss a potential return.
The Dodgers have not yet issued any lengthy explanation about their thinking in releasing Bauer. If they were totally honest, they’d say they wish the arbitrator had upheld the original suspension, because then it would have been somebody else’s decision.
Several articles, fortunately, have done the Dodgers’s explaining for them, and what it comes down to, basically, is that the team concluded keeping Bauer would have been bad business.
That is to say, the Dodgers’s image could have been tarnished if it seemed like they were welcoming Bauer back on the mound as if nothing had happened.
Because Major League Baseball clearly felt there was merit to the allegations, many if not most fans likely believe something unsavory happened. Since it involved physical violence against a woman in the course of what most people would consider a disturbing encounter, the Dodgers apparently felt they preferred to disassociate the team from any suggestion they didn’t take that seriously.
Baseball has not done well with selling itself over the past couple of decades. While it’s still popular, it has pretty clearly fallen behind football as the country’s glamour sport, and it has a fistful of subsidiary issues, from the struggles of smaller market teams to the steep decline in youth participation. Fewer fans are attending games, in large part because taking a family of four out for a fun night at the ballpark now can set you back several hundred dollars.
Let’s make a reasonable guess that given how hard baseball is working to sell itself, a team like the Dodgers feels it can’t afford to alienate any part of its fan base, or seem indifferent to something that even if consensual strikes most people as disturbing.
The Dodgers and Bauer are united, we can assume, in wishing this story never reached the magnitude it did. Moot point. People will eventually forget about it, but that’s not happening yet.
The Dodgers’s response is not unrelated to companies dropping sponsorship deals with, say, Kanye West after his comments about Jews. The circumstances and implications are totally different, but the corporate concern is the same: risking association with something customers could find offensive.
Former Major League player Trevor Plouffe put it this way earlier this week: “This is a brand issue. In my opinion and what I’ve heard, [the Dodgers] don’t want to be kind of associated with that and have to answer to that. This is a $5 billion dollar brand. You want to keep this brand pristine.”
The Dodgers’s decision won’t end the discussion, particularly because Bauer isn’t going away. He will almost certainly be wearing some Major League uniform come opening day, on a team happy to scarf up a potentially top-level pitcher who will be on the Dodgers’s tab.
There will be conflicting reports on whether players feel comfortable with his return. Some fans will say he did the time, whatever the crime, and should now be allowed to move forward. It will be argued whether, as Bauer contends, his accuser was simply trying to extort a rich athlete. It will be noted that the Washington Post found two other women who had previously filed similar complaints about Bauer.
It’s a fluid debate without all the details, which with any luck we will never get. A couple of things are clear, however, including the reminder that Turner is right: What we fans savor as a marvelous game does remain, at the end of the day, a business, with all the calculation thereunto appertaining.
