Cleveland Sports Forum

Rosenthal: MLB cannot allow Trevor Bauer to pitch on Sunday


By Ken Rosenthal Jul 1, 2021
Major League Baseball must act. A woman, in an official request to a court for a domestic violence restraining order, said that Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer assaulted her on two occasions. She made her allegation under the penalty of perjury. The league has the power to hit the pause button on Bauer’s season while continuing an investigation, and that is absolutely the step it must take.

Under its joint domestic violence policy with the players’ union, commissioner Rob Manfred can immediately place a player accused of domestic violence on administrative leave for up to seven days. The placement is not disciplinary, not a declaration of guilt. The player continues to get paid. He can also request a hearing before an arbitration panel within 24 hours seeking reinstatement.

It’s a procedural move, a relatively minor one at that. It’s the necessary move, considering the seriousness of the allegations against Bauer. And while the Dodgers could decide on their own to skip Bauer’s next start on Sunday, the joint policy says the initial authority to discipline players rests with the commissioner’s office. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts defaulted to that position Thursday night, telling reporters, “It’s out of our hands.”

That’s not true. The Dodgers choose which players they want to use every day. Near the end of the 2015 season, the Nationals suspended Jonathan Papelbon for four games without pay after he tried to choke teammate Bryce Harper in the dugout. Papelbon filed a grievance and won back his pay. The Nationals knew such an outcome was possible. But they went ahead with the suspension anyway, believing it was the right thing to do.

Evidently, the Dodgers are unwilling to take the same step, perhaps out of fear the union will file a grievance if they skip Bauer’s turn when he is healthy, perceiving it as an act of discipline. Fine, follow the domestic violence policy to the letter, and leave this to Manfred. Earlier this week, Manfred suspended Mariners pitcher Héctor Santiago 10 games for possessing a foreign substance on his glove. Granted, the offenses are entirely different. But how ridiculous would it look for MLB to dock Santiago and not even buy time with Bauer, whose alleged offense is far more serious? What exactly would Manfred’s trepidation be here?

To repeat: The woman signed a sworn statement. A temporary restraining order was granted. The Pasadena (Calif.) Police Department is conducting an active investigation. Also: Bauer responded to the allegations not by denying they happened, but by saying they were consensual. His attorney, Jon Fetterolf, said in a statement Tuesday that Bauer “did what was asked.”

In her statement, the woman said she did not ask Bauer to punch her in the face, vagina and buttocks, to stick his fingers down her throat, to engage in anal sex while she was unconscious. She said she sought medical attention after her second encounter with Bauer. And, as attorney Sheryl Ring noted Thursday on Twitter, “the law says that certain things are illegal EVEN IF CONSENT IS GIVEN (Ring’s cap) because they’re so eminently harmful, either that consent cannot be freely given for them, or because that consent is invalid as a matter of public policy.”

Which is not to say Bauer is guilty. The Pasadena Police Department will recommend to a district attorney whether to file charges against him, and he is entitled to due process, both from the legal system and the league. If he is charged, the league likely will withhold judgment until his case moves through the courts. Under its domestic violence policy, Bauer need neither be charged nor convicted for Manfred to suspend him. The legal principles and standards that apply in a courtroom do not necessarily apply in the workplace. The league has more latitude to exercise discretion, as do the Dodgers.

Placing Bauer on a seven-day administrative leave not only would spare the league the tone-deaf look of him taking the mound four days after The Athletic reported details of the restraining order, but also give Manfred and his investigators time to form a fuller judgment. The seven days would end just before the All-Star break, and the downtime at the break effectively would give the league nearly two weeks to determine its next course of action.

Bauer cannot remain on administrative leave indefinitely; after the seven days expire, Manfred would lose sole authority to keep him off the field. The union must approve any extension of administrative leave, as it did with former Cubs shortstop Addison Russell in 2018 and Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán in 2019, two players the league ultimately suspended.

Would the union fight a similar extension with Bauer? Perhaps, if it believed the league was acting unfairly. The union, after all, exists to defend and assert the rights of the players. But based on the details in the domestic violence restraining order against Bauer, the union also might view a prolonged investigation into his conduct as warranted.

One step at a time. The first question is whether the league should allow Bauer to take the mound Sunday when it has the power to place him on a form of leave that assigns him no guilt and enables him to continue getting paid.

The answer for Manfred is so obvious, he should have announced the decision almost immediately. If Bauer wants to challenge it, fine. If he prevails in front of an arbitrator or ultimately is cleared of any wrongdoing, so be it. But when a star player faces such pointed allegations, a league that professes to be taking domestic violence and sexual misconduct against women seriously cannot abandon that responsibility. It cannot allow Bauer to pitch Sunday.

Tyler Naquin went 0-for-3 on Friday in his return to the Reds' lineup.

Naquin wound up missing five games due to a wrist injury. The 30-year-old outfielder is hitting .247/.313/.457 with 25 runs scored, 16 homers, 46 RBI and four stolen bases across 71 games this season.

Of all people Ben Gamel is heating up for the Pirates.

Surprised no one has posted anything about the most recent doings of Crazy Trevor Bauer. He's the physically healthiest pitcher around [compare him for example with the current status of those he's shared the Cleveland rotation with in recent years: Kluber, Carrasco Clevinger Bieber Civale Plesac] but mentally and/or "developmentally" he's a mess.

Until there's actually some clarity about the validity of the accusations it actually doesn't interest me.

Wasn't this guy on the team in spring training?


Hembree, Heath

Hembree picked up the save Wednesday against the Royals after hurling a scoreless inning, striking out one.

Analysis
Hembree has gone 3-for-4 in save chances across his last four outings, as he has taken over the closing duties with both Lucas Sims (elbow) and Tejay Antone (forearm) on the injured list.

yep., but the bullpen although wearing out from overuse, is still the strongest unit on the team.
I would however stop bringing in Sandlin with men on base, he tends to let them all score

I think I read elsewhere that Heath Hembree picked up another pitch since spring training. So it goes.

Good for him. Overall we've had a pretty good bullpen; although the co-closers have been less than perfect recently.
Shaw has been surprisingly effective.
Wittgren is not as reliable as last year
Sandlin is OK but not with inherited runners
I'd be happier without Maton but for the time being they need a crowd out there
Parker has been better than I'd have guessed
For a Rule 5 guy Stephan has been rather effective
DJ Johnson isn't very good but he has a great beard
Kyle Nelson has failed a couple tests
The kid I expected to rise up quickly Nick Mikolejcheck has stumbled recently in Akron.

Apparently Ohtani's first MLB homerun was off Josh Tomlin - who STILL is pitching by the way.

What’s it like on the other end of a Shohei Ohtani homer? Let’s ask pitchers: ‘It’s kind of mind-blowing’


By Stephen J. Nesbitt 7h ago 6
Riding the subway to Yankee Stadium the day after being Shohei’d, Jameson Taillon shook his head and tried making sense of his start. He had pitched into the sixth inning on June 29 against the Angels and allowed five runs, a line that normally would leave a sour taste in his mouth. Instead, Taillon felt like tipping his cap. He had walked off the mound amazed, marveling at the man who had driven in three runs with two mighty, home run swings against him.

“Shohei Ohtani. The dude is special,” Taillon said, emerging from the subway and into the Bronx sunlight. “A special dude on a special hot streak right now.”

What struck Taillon more than anything else — more than the velocity or distance of Ohtani’s missiles — were the pitches Ohtani had hit. The first was a changeup, tailing low and away to the left-handed hitter. Ohtani ripped it into the right-field seats. The second was a two-strike fastball, 95 mph, at the top of the strike zone. Ohtani hit a screamer into the second row. Two opposite pitches, executed exactly as called by catcher Gary Sánchez, both destroyed.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever given up balls hit that hard in those situations on those pitches,” Taillon said. “And as I came out of the game, it hit me: What I just did tonight, Ohtani is about to do tomorrow. He’s going to pitch against the frickin’ New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium after dominating at the plate for the first couple of games. It’s incredible. It’s kind of mind-blowing.”

The book of pitchers Ohtani has taken deep in his MLB career grows longer by the day. Five names have joined since Taillon (No. 68 in Ohtani’s book). Marco Gonzales (No. 73) is the latest, added Friday when Ohtani smashed a sinker for his league-leading 33rd home run this season. Throughout his historic first half, Ohtani — selected to the All-Star Game as both a hitter and a pitcher, and the Home Run Derby headliner — left a trail of pitchers turning to watch his homers fly, craning their necks to watch the baseball’s arc, wondering how Ohtani had just hit that pitch that far.

On the second day of the season, Ohtani pulled White Sox closer Liam Hendriks’ 97 mph full-count heater on the outer edge to right-center field for his first homer of 2021. Hendriks, the affable Aussie (and now No. 43 in Ohtani’s book), joked, “We’re going to be on TV in Japan for about a month after that one, so it’s good to be building my brand a little bit.”

“The guy’s a different breed,” Orioles starter Keegan Akin (No. 69) said after Ohtani homered off Akin and Dillon Tate (No. 70) on July 2 to give him 13 homers in 15 games. “It feels like whatever you throw him, you can’t get him out.”

“He’s doing things that have never been done before,” said Thomas Eshelman (No. 71), another Baltimore starter added to Ohtani’s book two days later.


“He’s doing things that have never been done before,” Thomas Eshelman said of Shohei Ohtani. (Katelyn Mulcahy / Getty Images)
On a sun-scorched afternoon at PNC Park in Pittsburgh last week, Braves reliever Josh Tomlin (No. 1) beamed as he spoke about Ohtani. Tomlin is the answer to the trivia question, “Who was pitching when Shohei Ohtani hit his first major-league home run?” And he isn’t shy about it. When teammates talk about Ohtani, Tomlin likes to tell them, “Yeah, he’s good, but I got him hot.”

Tomlin started for Cleveland on April 3, 2018, the second game of Ohtani’s career. When Ohtani stepped to the plate for his first at-bat, the designated hitter batting eighth, Tomlin wasn’t sure what to expect. The scouting report was thin. Ohtani had struggled in spring training, on the mound and at the plate, and there were concerns about how well his hitting would adjust in the majors. Tomlin remembers how long Ohtani looked in the batter’s box — like Alex Rodríguez. Tall hitters typically have big holes in their swings that pitchers can expose. With two strikes, Tomlin tried coaxing Ohtani to chase a curveball.

The curve caught too much of the zone, though, and Ohtani clobbered it.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve played in Anaheim and the fans were that loud,” the 36-year-old Tomlin said, recalling Ohtani circling the bases that day. “And when he hit that home run, it was like back in the day when the Bobby Abreus and (Jered) Weavers were there early on. It was a cool feeling to be back in that ballpark when it was like that. Just wish it wasn’t against us.”

In his next game, Ohtani took Corey Kluber (No. 2) deep.

And in the next one, he homered off Oakland’s Daniel Gossett (No. 3).

As Ohtani mashes his way into the record books, turning back time with each Ruthian blast, the pitchers serving up the homers are far more impressed than upset. They’re perplexed. The holes in his swing are hard to find, and harder to hit. Ohtani punishes mistakes, but he also makes good pitches disappear. He smashes outside pitches to the opposite field (Nick Pivetta, No. 53; Wily Peralta, No. 63). He golfs low breaking balls into the stratosphere in straightaway center field (Casey Mize, No. 64). He turns on upper-90s mph fastballs above the zone (Dylan Cease, No. 44; Sam Hentges, No. 55).

“He gets to everything,” the Rays’ Tyler Glasnow (No. 51) said on the “The Chris Rose Rotation” podcast after Ohtani fouled off knee-buckling curveballs May 3 and then hit a slider over the center-field shrubbery at Angel Stadium. “It’s good to see him succeeding — even if he has to hit home runs off of me.”

Chris Martin, another member of the Braves’ bullpen alongside Tomlin, played with Ohtani on the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in 2016 and 2017. The scouts flocking to watch Ohtani in Japan helped get Martin another look, bringing him back to the majors. One game, Martin said, Ohtani led off the first inning with a home run, then threw eight shutout innings before Martin closed it out. “That’s when I knew this guy was the real deal,” Martin told the Angels broadcast in 2018. “He won the game by himself.”

Oh, Martin (No. 20) is in Ohtani’s book, too. Two strikes. Oppo taco.

When Braves teammates asked Martin about Ohtani earlier this season, Martin told them, “I knew he was good. Did I know he was going to be this good over here? Not sure I knew that.” As Ohtani rolls on, pitchers debate about the sustainability of his workload. Tomlin guessed that Ohtani will eventually pitch out of the bullpen to ensure he can be in the lineup each day.

“But I don’t want to see that,” Tomlin said, smiling again. “I want to see him starting games. I think it’s fun. At a time when the game’s a little bit rough right now with all the stuff going on with MLB and the players (association), I think it’s good for the game. And it grows the game, makes it more international. He gets to go to the All-Star Game and do both, pitch and hit? That’s incredible. And the Home Run Derby? Wow. That’s going to be fun.”

More: Shohei Ohtani keeps pushing MLB’s boundaries. Whatever his future holds, let’s enjoy his remarkable present

For most pitchers, two-way play is a pipe dream they’re talked out of pursuing before they are professionals. Cleveland starter Zach Plesac (No. 56) bounced around the field in high school and college. In the minors, he asked the organization’s then-pitching coordinator Ruben Niebla if he could play the field. Plesac recalls Niebla telling him, “(Pitching) is your gift. We’ve got a plan for you.” Plesac thinks Ohtani, who hammered his fastball 440 feet in May, could change minds, carving a path for others to try the two-way experiment.

Which isn’t to say that there are others like Ohtani.

“He’s a superstar,” Plesac said.

Ohtani is baseball’s unicorn. Or, put another way, he’s “a mythical legend in human form,” as Mets starter Marcus Stroman tweeted in May. (Stroman is not in Ohtani’s book. His teammate Taijuan Walker, however, is No. 39.)


(Gary A. Vasquez / USA Today)
Pitchers take the Ohtani question — How is he doing this? — rather literally. They ask, does Ohtani attend pitchers meetings, hitters meetings or both? Does he stretch with hitters or pitchers? How does he distill two sets of scouting reports at once? They see Ohtani’s greatness in his approach. In the batter’s box, he thinks like a hitter and a pitcher. He sees a pitcher’s strengths and how they’ll attack him. On the mound, he operates the same way. All of it is a testament, Tomlin said, to Ohtani’s intelligence, motivation and work ethic.

“He’s playing a game with the best in the world, and he gets to do it like he’s playing in high school,” Tomlin said. “He gets to pitch, hit, run the bases, play outfield. He’s living every kid’s dream, right? … On any given night, he can go out there and throw a no-hitter and hit two bombs.”

As of Sunday, Ohtani was 77 percent better than the average hitter, by OPS+, and 32 percent better than the average pitcher, by ERA+.

“You’re talking about the highest level in the world,” Taillon said. “And if you were literally just a league-average pitcher and a league-average hitter — or even a tad below and could stick in the big leagues and truly do both — that’s still incredible. But to be very good at both? It’s hard to wrap my head around.”

With that, Taillon walked through the players’ entrance at Yankee Stadium and headed down a tunnel toward the clubhouse. Ohtani would be bounced in the first inning of the game, and the evening would be plagued by rain delays and seven-run innings. But there was a buzz in the Bronx before the game. Taillon could feel it. Thirty-thousand trekked to Yankee Stadium that night.

They all were there to see a show.

Hope he makes it back; after conquering cancer it is really disappointing that now he's shut down for over half a year for a standard baseball injury.

Kluber's out for the year, right?
Clevinger, too.
Bauer who knows?!

Corey Kluber (shoulder) has begun a throwing program.

Kluber is not expected to return to the Yankees' rotation until September, but he's begun a flat-ground throwing program, playing catch up to 75 feet. He should progress to throwing a bullpen and facing live hitters in the next few weeks. Clearly, the Yankees are not going to rush him back, but he's trending towards a possible late-season return.

better news than I thought. Corey seems to probably be near the end of the line but you know he'll keep working hard as long as he has a chance.

Which reminds of: whatever happened to Danny Salazar, the anti-Kluber. I loved that return from rehab when he showed up dozens of pounds overweight and throwing slowballs.

Rob Manfred: A's future in Oakland to be decided soon; Las Vegas 'viable' option
By The Athletic Staff



Crucial votes over the next few months will "determine the fate of baseball in Oakland," MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday, as the Athletics' future in the city they've called home since 1968 remains clouded amid a search for a new stadium.

"(A's controlling majority owner) John Fisher has done everything I’ve asked him to do in terms of keeping the A’s in Oakland and more than I asked him to do in terms of financial commitment," Manfred told reporters. "So we’re going to know one way or another what’s going to happen in Oakland in the next couple of months.

"If you can’t get a ballpark, the relocation process — whether it’s Las Vegas or a broader array of cities that are considered — will take on more pace.”

A's executives have visited Las Vegas multiple times and reportedly were scheduled to visit Portland in June, as they explore possible relocation cities.

Pressed Tuesday on whether Las Vegas is a viable option or simply being used to apply pressure on the city of Oakland, Manfred replied, "Las Vegas is a viable alternative for a major-league club, and there are other viable alternatives that I haven’t turned the A’s loose to even explore at this point."

"Thinking about this as a bluff is a mistake," he continued. "This is the decision point for Oakland as to whether they want to have Major League Baseball going forward.”

Manfred also discussed the removal of temporary rule changes that were instituted in 2020, as well as the league's newly implemented policy on foreign substances.

He said the seven-inning doubleheaders that began with 2020's condensed season will end after the 2021 season, with the league returning to nine-inning doubleheaders in 2022. Likewise, the rule that puts a runner on second base to start each frame in extra innings will likely be removed after this season.

As he told The Athletic shortly after the new foreign-substance policy was implemented last month, Manfred said Tuesday he thinks umpires checks of pitchers have gone well. He praised umpires for how they've handled enforcement and said the league is happy that strikeouts are down without a tangible increase in hit batters.

“This is a step along the road to a more entertaining game," Manfred said.