The (Complicated) History of Trevor Bauer...

at just 10 years old he was already getting bullied by his classmates for his obsession with the game of baseball in high school he had the cops called on him multiple times just for practicing and he even decided to graduate a year early after his varsity coach threatened to kick him off the team but just four years later and Trevor Bower was named the best college baseball player in the country drafted number three overall and made his major league debut all while earning the reputation as the most hated man in baseball so how did he get here and what was the reason and all of his teammates from grade school to the MLB hated him because there was a specific reason and it not only made him baseball's biggest villain but it's also the reason he won the Sai Young Award well we're about to find out because this is the story of the controversial rise of Trevor Bower Bower was born in North Hollywood California in 1991 his dad was a chemical engineer who worked in the oil fields of California and didn't know much about baseball however Bower took a liking to the sport early on and even started playing with his dad at as young as 2 years old the two of them would even travel down to Arizona every year to watch spring training which is where Bower fell in love with the star pictures of the early 2000s but one guy in particular proved to be his biggest inspiration you see growing up bow learned very quickly that he didn't think or act like other kids and a lot of these differences came from the fact that Bower loved baseball more than anything else in fourth grade he was even bullied for wearing baseball pants to school but this only C cause his love for the game to grow even larger and by the age of 10 he started working with a private coach by the name of Jim Wagner Bower's parents agreed to pay for the private lessons on the condition that he practiced outside of his sessions as well he agreed and began to spend all of his free time from the age of 10 on practicing baseball now around this time Bow's dad took a new job in New Mexico which meant that he would leave California every Sunday and wouldn't return home until Friday this meant that if Bower wanted to practice baseball he had to do it alone which caused kids to call him a nerd as he rode his bike to the park with two buckets of 48 baseballs on each handlebar here he would throw long toss alone into a tennis court fence where he would have to then walk to pick up all the balls and then walk back to begin throwing again he did this so often that the local tennis coach started calling the cops on him and even began stealing his Baseballs in an attempt to get him to stop even though Bower wasn't breaking any rules regardless he continued the solo training all the way through high school but then in ninth grade he took a class that would change the trajectory of his career forever it was a high school physics class taught by a man named Mark Kirby and it was here that Bower learned the concepts of Leverage Velocity energy transfer and whip all biomechanical tools that modern-day pitchers understand to be incredibly important but back in 2003 were rarely talked about in baseball circles however for Bower who at the time was barely 5'8 and 150 lb these were incredibly important lesson for how he could get the most out of his body now at this point Bow's sole Focus was making his high school baseball team in interviews he talks about how he would always look at the level of baseball he wanted to get to and reverse engineer way for him to get there he credits this type of thinking to his father who was an engineer and says that he modeled his own baseball training based on the scientific philosophy that if he put in x amount of work he should get y outcome and as a freshman in high school the only outcome he had in mind was making the school's baseball team so we began waking up at 5:30 a.m. to do pool workouts at the local YMCA three times per week he would then go to school baseball practice eat dinner and then go back out to the park by his house for three more hours of practice baseball consumed his whole life which as he describes made him even more of a social outcast but he didn't care because his work was paying off he made his high school team his freshman year but by the time he was a sophomore he was still only throwing 72 mph however by then he had already turned his sights onto his next goal playing college baseball so we began working even harder and finding new ways to apply his love of physics to gain an edge on the field because Bower knew that in order to play at the next level his velocity would have to increase by at least 20 mph this goal resulted in some pretty unorthodox training Methods at the time which caused even more bullying from classmates teammates and even coaches for example his entire sophomore year he carried around a 6ot long pliable tube that he would use for shoulder strengthening exercises but his teammates began hiding it in the trees before games and his JV coach even told him that he relied on it to compensate for his small penis nevertheless Bower continued to experiment with his body even seeking out the most specialized training facility in the country at the Texas baseball Ranch after a sophomore season keep in mind at this time Bower was still an undersized right-handed pitcher who didn't throw more than 75 mph but he believes so much in perfecting his biomechanical training that he and his parents were willing to seek out the best of the best which likely cost them thousands of dollars every month now coming into his Junior season Bower had grown a bit reaching 6'1 and 170 lb but his High School coaches still found his training regiment and personality a bit odd so they stuck him in the bullpen for their first four games but when he finally got an opportunity to start on the varsity team he didn't look back he finished his Junior season with a 12- 0 record a 79 ER and a fast ball that topped out at 92 mph but unfortunately that success came with a cost because Bower notably did not get along well with his coaches or his teammates he refused to participate in any team training or development that wasn't his own which caused him to become even more of an outcast than he already was this along with getting ejected for arguing with an Umpire caused his varsity coach to write him a letter in the middle of the season threatening to kick him off the team but it was also during this season that Bower had a lifechanging realization I was 17 as in high school I had gotten up in the morning to go to the YMCA did my pre preschool workout came back showered was looking in the mirror I was like you know why what what is it about me that like I don't have friends that people like don't like me that they bully me that they pick on me like all this stuff and I just made the decision that day I was like I like myself like I'm good in school I treat people well I'm hard work I like what I see looking back at me so I'm going to be okay with that and I'm not going to I'm going to stop chasing like approval from other people and as long as I can be proud of myself I'm cool with it and so that gave me the freedom internally to like have a voice and when someone would say something to me I'd fire back and it was this mentality that caused him to make a decision that would change his life forever Trevor Bower decided to graduate high school after his junior year which allowed him to enroll a year early at UCLA one of the many schools that recruited him to play baseball as a mechanical engineering major it was here that his obsession with the game grew even more and where he began to develop an affection for his new favorite player Tim linsicum you see linsicum was also an undersized right-hander who was just a few years older than Bower and pitched at the University of Washington Bower describes how he obsessed over one of lum's outings against UCLA where he struck out 16 bow poured over Lin's mechanics in this video and learned how he got the most out of his small frame Bower even told his coach at UCLA John Savage that he would only come to the university if no one tried to change his form coach Savage agreed as long as Bower kept performing well however not everyone on the team was on board with Bower doing his own thing you see when Bower arrived at UCLA in early 2009 he wasn't the only highly recruited pitcher on the team in fact there was someone who had already been there for months training with the team after turning down $4 million to be drafted 28th overall by the Yankees and when Bower immediately started opting out of Team strength and conditioning workouts to do his own flexibility and Mobility training he got torn apart in front of everyone now keep in mind B was just 17 years old and his coach had given him the okay to do his own thing but that didn't stop Garrett Cole from telling him that he had no future in baseball he didn't work hard and even calling him a to which Trevor responded you because just like in high school he wasn't at UC to be well-liked by his teammates he was there to accomplish his next two goals win the golden spikes award which is the Heisman Trophy of college baseball and get drafted just like his favorite pitcher Tim linsicum had done but Bower managed to do more than that in his first year which would have been his senior season in high school he won freshman pitcher of the year and just two years later as a junior he won the golden spikes with a 1.25 ra Bower says he was only able to accomplish this by hyper fixating on baseball in training which as he admits resulted in him not attending a lot of his classes but it also led to him getting drafted number three overall by the Diamondbacks in 2011 just two spots behind his teammate gar Cole but it wasn't going to be smooth sailing like this for long you see as Trevor was going through the draft process he wanted to interview the teams that might be drafting him he did this to ensure that the team that selected him wouldn't mess with his training regiment or mechanics because just like at UCLA Bower felt like he knew best how to maximize his own potential luckily for him the assistant GM of the Arizona Diamondbacks Jerry depoto agreed to the stipulation before the team drafted him third overall but 4 months later depoto took a job as the Angels general manager which left B without any supporters in the organization in fact it turns out he had more enemies than anything the next year in his first Big League start he was constantly shaking off veteran catcher Miguel Montero who later said that Bower quote never wanted to listen and after just four appearances with the team where he posted a 1- two record 6.06 ra 13 walks and 17 strikeouts in just 16.7 Innings he was traded to Cleveland a year and a half after being drafted by Arizona and things didn't get much better in Cleveland with teammates continuing to ridicule his training techniques in general obsession with the game you see according to Bower he had trained his whole life to do one thing throw a baseball he had never smoked Ben drunk gor even gotten a different haircut hell he couldn't even throw a football more than 10 yards he had perfected the art of throwing a baseball and he had done it by obsessively training for the past 16 years but it still wasn't enough to succeed at the major league level and accomplish his ultimate goal as a player winning a saong and Bower quickly started to realize that his obsession had consequences you see from the age of 10 until the age of 26 Bower's life revolves entirely around baseball his identity and selfworth were all molded by the game which frequently led him to spiral he explains how he'd have a bad outing go home and study until 4:00 or 5 in the morning wake up physically drained and then do it all over again with another bad performance this led Bower to having even worse relationships with teammates and even lashing out against people online and it wasn't until the 2017 All-Star break after another disappointing start to the season that Bower realized he needed to rebalance his life it was no longer sustainable for him to be so obsessed with baseball and I think that the next big step for me as a person is to figure out how is Trevor Bower the person happy what does happiness look like for me and how do I then achieve that how do I get there it's like the next process to to figure out so he took the 5 days to travel with friends and dig into his other Hobbies of Photography and drone flying it was here where he had the realization that he could take his obsessive personality and apply it to other areas of his life this way he wouldn't burn himself out only focusing on baseball rather he could take his unique way of thinking and go setting and apply it to other things to keep his mind occupied and fresh and as crazy or simple as this realization sounds it changed something in Bow he finished the second half of the 2017 season with a 10-2 record and 3.01 ra and the next year he made his first ever All-Star team but for Bower there was still something missing you see as Bow's play on the field improved he became more aware of the shortcomings of baseball off the field in his opinion the sport did a horrible job of connecting with its fans it was stuffy and full of Unwritten rules all things that Bower hated and had actively pushed back on throughout his career going all the way back to his time in the minor leagues Bower wanted to meet the fans where they were online because for him obsessing over those videos of tin linsicum were what made him fall even more in love with baseball but when Bower tried to post his own Minor League highlights on his YouTube channel in 2012 in a series he called weekly whiffs his team shut him down but still Bower continued experimenting with posting videos by highlighting his unique workouts and demonstrating pitch Crips but it wasn't until 2019 that he realized what he was really meant to do for the game of baseball make it more like the NBA you see Bower explains how the best moments in any League especially the NBA are the moments before after and between plays shura Steph Curry 3 is cool but his celebration while the ball is in the air is even cooler or LeBron's pregame routine or Kyrie shoes these are all the most V viral parts of the game so why couldn't baseball do the same bow wondered why he couldn't both perform and entertain plus he was the perfect guy to do it since in a game full of Unwritten rules there needed to be a player who was okay pissing a lot of people off and Bower was certainly used to that so in a late August game in 2020 in the middle of his sa young season Bower and his marketing team concocted a plan you see Bower needed just five strikeouts in his upcoming start against the Brewers to set a Red's team record for most strikeouts in his first five appearances fully aware of this days before his scheduled start he tweeted hold my beer when his teammate Soni gray broke the record before him Budweiser saw this and wanted to get involved so Bower reached out and told them he planned to spell out the word buds on the back of the mound for his first four strikeout and then fake chug a beer when he broke the record with his fifth the clip was everywhere including on his new media company's YouTube channel which had started the year prior in 2019 you see the that this moment was planned out and captured on his own company's page was the perfect example of Bower's vision for baseball he was starting momentum to help reach younger fans through these sort of pre-planned viral moments they were going to be his version of an NFL touchdown celebration but momentum also had an ulterior motive one that Bower was fully willing to admit explaining in 2019 that he was building his own media company in part to be an online bully back to the media who had called him a bad teammate in Cleveland in Arizona but regardless of the reason he started it his plan worked momentum currently leads the way for online baseball media with 62,000 subscribers but their success goes beyond just the numbers because for a guy like Bower who had always had a tough time expressing himself he finally has a place he can be his authentically weird self and I'd be lying if I said I didn't change my opinion of him from what I had before because of momentum now I purposely ended this video before we got to the allegations women have made against him I also glossed over a number of stories where Bower was accused and even admitted to harassing people online including a young female college student if I learned anything about Bower in my days of research for this video it's that he's a weird guy and he has often used his failed interpersonal relationships as an excuse to treat other people badly and for a long time I just assumed that this was reserved for Twitter or his teammates but in 2022 we learned that he may have taken things even further I don't want to get into the specifics of each allegation but if you're a supporter of bower I just want you to take a step back for a second he's an obsessive athlete in his early 30s who's just a few years removed from the best season of his career if he had even a little bit of value to provide an MLB team someone would have signed him by now I mean he's even offered to play for the league minimum but no one has which makes me think that there may be something to all of these allegations more than some political iCal blackballing conspiracy bow is an interesting case of obsession going too far and personal success coming at the expense of others there's no doubt that Bow's ability to get the most out of his body is impressive even admirable but I think he'd even admit that it came at the cost of his relationships and well-being thanks for watching please like And subscribe for more of these Sports deep dieses

Channel: Tyler Webb

Views: 58,954

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Id: z9IOOSuhnZc

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024