Southpaw 41: End the Bauer Outage
We already know enough about Trevor Bauer to know how this story should end.
Dear readers,
It’s been a busy week in the world of sports and politics. We’re not going to be able to get to every story that broke this week, so we’ll start with a brief recap:
On Monday, Dan Crenshaw, a sitting U.S. Congressman, said that Gwen Berry, a Black hammer thrower, should be kicked off the U.S. Olympic Team for not being sufficiently reverential during National Anthem at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. On Tuesday, we learned that yet another MLB star is being investigated for brutalizing a woman. On Wednesday, we discovered that the WNBA is not only the wokest league in America but also the most immunized. On Thursday, the NCAA finally threw up its hands and stopped enforcing rules that prevent college athletes from their name, image, and likeness. On Friday, details emerged about the NFL’s investigation of the Washington Redskins, which found that the team’s owner, the Satanic homunculus Dan Snyder, had fostered a workplace culture that promoted sexual harassment, bullying, intimidation, and, of course, bad football. (And, as the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins points out, the investigation was almost as rotten as the team culture.) Also on Friday, we learned that another rising Olympic star, the American sprinter, Sha’Carri Richardson, will be forced to forgo her Olympic bid because she smoked weed in a state where it’s legal to do so. Then, to top it all off, the International Olympic Committee released its revised rules on political demonstrations by athletes, which (very slightly) relaxed the IOC’s blanket ban on political protest.
This brings us to Fourth of July weekend (happy Independence Day everyone), when the aforementioned MLB star and sexual assailant, L.A. Dodgers starting pitcher Trevor Bauer, was scheduled to take the mound against the Washington Nationals in the nation’s capital for an Independence Day classic until Major League Baseball intervened.
We’ve written pretty exhaustively about the MLB’s deranged handling of domestic violence accusations, and this incident and the surrounding reaction to it has done nothing to change our minds. Stories like this make it hard to be a fan.
-Ian & Calder
Trevor Bauer physically and sexually assaulted a woman. What more do you need to know?
Note: This story includes descriptions of sexual assault allegations.
On Tuesday, Major League Baseball dolled out its first suspension under the league’s new “sticky stuff” enforcement regime—a 10-game ban for the Seattle Mariners relief pitcher Hector Santiago, who committed the unspeakable sin of (maybe) placing a foreign substance on his glove during a game last Sunday against the Chicago White Sox.
Also on Tuesday, The Athletic reported that the Pasadena Police Department is investigating Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher and shameless shitposter Trevor Bauer (“@BauerOutage”) for allegations of assault and sexual battery.
Major League Baseball suspended Santiago immediately. It took the league four days and a massive media uproar to take action against Bauer—which they ultimately did on Friday when they placed Bauer on administrative leave for only seven days pending an “ongoing investigation.” Santiago will be docked pay and is presumed guilty. Bauer will be paid for his time off and is afforded the presumption of innocence.
If you’re struggling to wrap your head around this disparity, join the club. On Thursday, The Athletic published additional details about the allegations against Bauer after a California court granted a temporary restraining order against him. The details, gleaned from a 67-page ex parte court document, are appalling. According to the documents, Bauer and the women were engaged in a consensual sexual encounter when the pitcher turned violent, choking his partner with her own hair until she lost consciousness. The woman alleges that when she finally regained consciousness, she found Bauer penetrating her anally—without her consent.
In a subsequent sexual encounter two weeks after the initial incident, Bauer repeatedly punched the woman in the face, body, and genitals, and again strangled her until she lost consciousness. Pictures taken after the second encounter and included in the court document show the woman with two black eyes and visible swelling on her neck and face. “I agreed to have consensual sex,” the woman said in her testimony. “However I did not agree or consent to what he did next. I did not agree to be sexually assaulted.”
Bauer and his lawyers have sought to cast his victim’s stated interest in rough sex in an exculpatory light. In text messages exchanged with Bauer in between their meetings, the woman asked Bauer to “choke me out” and “Gimme all the pain.” In other text messages exchanged after the incident, Bauer responded sympathetically when the woman informed him that she had sought medical treatment for the injuries he had inflicted upon her. In a statement released on Thursday, Bauer’s agent challenged the accusations, saying, “Mr. Bauer had a brief and wholly consensual sexual relationship initiated by [the woman] beginning in April 2021. . . Her basis for filing a protection order is nonexistent, fraudulent, and deliberately omits key facts, information, and her own relevant communications.”
You can decide for yourself whether these details matter in an ethical sense (they don’t), and, with any luck, a jury will decide whether they matter in a legal sense (they shouldn’t). But all of that is sort of besides the point. The point is, we don’t know what sort of legal punishment Bauer will face—and neither does Major League Baseball.
As we’ve written before, there’s a lot wrong with MLB’s domestic violence policy, but it does get at least one thing right. The league’s joint domestic policy with the MLB Players Association allows the commissioner to place a player on administrative leave for up to seven days while the league investigates domestic violence accusations. They are right to use the policy in this instance.
Still, it’s much too early to celebrate the league’s decision as any sort of justice. Before Bauer was placed on leave on Friday, a reporter asked Dodgers manager Dave Roberts whether Bauer would take the field on Sunday. Roberts responded that the decision was “out of their hands.”
He’s lying. In fact, before Major League Baseball stepped in, Roberts was one of the few people who could have done something about this issue—by simply refusing to put Bauer in the lineup card on Sunday.
This wouldn’t be some sort of unprecedented act. Baseball players get benched all the time—for not running out a ground ball, or showing up late to practice (Roberts himself did this to former-Dodger Yasiel Puig, arguing “no one can be bigger than the team”), or even for drowning their sorrows at 1Oak after a supermodel ex-girlfriend started dating a New England Patriot. While 1Oak is a little gauche for our taste, any reasonable person can see that none of these actions even fall in the same universe as what it is known that Bauer did. To refuse to bench him is a simple moral failing on the part of the entire Los Angeles Dodgers organization.
As the MLB investigation goes on, we all already know where this is going. Trevor Bauer, famed decrier of "cancel culture," is likely muttering in private—and will probably soon say in public—that he is being canceled. His remarkably scummy agent Rachel Luba wrote in a notes-app-twitter-statement on Thursday that “I am privy to MUCH more information than what has been reported publicly at this time and am confident that the truth will come to light.” Bauer and his supporters will do their best to frame this as some sort of politically charged part of the culture war, and if he’s lucky, he’ll get an invite to do Tucker Carlson Tonight.
At the end of the day, Trevor Bauer is likely too rich and too famous to go to jail for his assault. He will almost certainly settle out of court, making sure that the settlement includes a gag order on his victim. And even if Major League Baseball does dole out a significant suspension, he’ll probably find teams still interested in employing him, just like Aroldis Chapman, Roberto Osuna, or any number of other players did after they served their suspensions for domestic violence.
Putting aside Bauer’s long history of harassing women online, we don’t need an MLB investigator to tell us that he assaulted a woman so badly that she lost consciousness, ended up in the hospital with a fractured skull, and felt so brutalized that she filed a restraining order against him.
That should basically be the ballgame. Nevertheless, Bauer’s fans have already started to flood the comments sections under articles and tweets about his suspension, arguing either for “due process” or the presumption of innocence—as if this is not exactly what due process and the presumption of innocence looks like. Due to his preternatural ability to throw a baseball, Bauer is getting the best defense money can buy. He will be far from steamrolled. Despite the overwhelming evidence already available to the public, he’s still only been placed on leave with pay for a week.
So, please, spare us the “cancelation” nonsense. Just this once.
GO DEEPER:
“There’s Zero Reason Trevor Bauer Should Start On Sunday,” by Barry Petchesky in Defector (July 2, 2021).
“Trevor Bauer Must Not Start Sunday,” by Stephanie Apstein in Sports Illustrated (July 2, 2021).
“MLB cannot allow Trevor Bauer to pitch on Sunday,” by Ken Rosenthal in The Athletic (July 2, 2021).
“MLB cannot let Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer start Sunday,” by Bill Plaschke in The Los Angeles Times (July 1, 2021).
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the latest front in the GOP’s tone-deaf war on activist athletes? “Dan Crenshaw wants Gwen Berry kicked off the Olympic team. How un-American,” by Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post (June 29, 2021).
. . . the U.S. Olympic Committee’s very silly drug rules? “Sha'Carri Richardson's Olympic drug ban: Why is marijuana a prohibited substance?” by Jeff Eisenberg and Henry Bushnell in Yahoo! Sports (July 2, 2021).
. . . Word Athletic’s even more draconian anti-doping regime? “An Abortion, a Missed Drug Test and Altered Records Add Up to Trouble,” by Juliet Macur in The New York Times (July 1, 2021).
. . . how college athletes are taking advantage of the NCAA’s new name, image, and likeness rules? “College Athletes Score, Cutting Deals as a New Marketplace Is Born,” by Alan Blinder in The New York Times (July 1, 2021).
. . . the NCAA’s (sort of) progress on expanding athlete’s rights? “The NCAA and Supreme Court took a small step to fix college sports. It’s not nearly enough,” by Kevin Blackistone in The Washington Post (June 30, 2021).